Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melanie Davern, Senior Research Fellow, Director Australian Urban Observatory, Deputy Director (Acting) Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University
This article is part of our series on aged care. You can read the other articles in the series here.
In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed issues and inequities across society. How we plan for ageing populations and older people is one critical issue that has been neglected for decades. Fresher-faced youth and families have become the demographic focus of increasingly short-term electoral cycles, reinforcing a deep-seated prejudice against ageing and older people.
If Gandhi is right, and the true measure of a society can be found in how we treat the most vulnerable, then Australia has a lot to learn from the 683 deaths from COVID-19 in residential aged care this year. Australia needs a radical shift to policies that better support ageing in place — that is, in their own homes — rather than relying so heavily on underfunded and poorly resourced residential aged care.
However, residential aged care is only part of the problem of failing to plan adequately for ageing. Neoliberal policies have turned the ageing population into a growing consumer market while filial piety or family caring becomes rarer as economic and social pressures on working families (their adult children) become greater.
These trends have reinforced health inequities. More than 100,000 people are on the waiting list for in-home support package funding. Over the past two years, 28,000 people have died before receiving any funding.
The 50-year-old child-friendly cities movement has increasingly emphasised how the features of a city that make it safe, healthy and accommodating for its most vulnerable citizens can also make it much more liveable for everyone.
In recent research we looked at how the World Health Organisation’s Global Age-Friendly Cities Guide can be applied in local planning. The aim was to develop practical tools to help policymakers and planners assess the age-friendliness of local neighbourhoods. This included the use of spatial indicators to measure the eight domains of the Age-Friendly Cities framework.
Spatial indicators investigating the relationship between health and place are created using geographic information systems (GIS) to map the presence of features within a local area. We have suggested key indicators that can be created and mapped using desktop analysis to understand how age-friendly local spaces are.
Author provided
One of the most striking features is that many of these suggested measures are important for everyone living locally and not just older people. Examples include good walkability, public open spaces, public transport, affordable housing, local services, cafes, doctors and internet connectivity. Others are age-specific such as in-home aged care.
Most importantly, all of these factors are essential ingredients of healthy and liveable communities. Together, they support better health and well-being outcomes for all. We have mapped many of the suggested measures of age-friendly communities in the Australian Urban Observatory.
Some of these indicators might not necessarily be feasible for all regional and rural communities. Many regional communities have reduced access to services. However, these indicators still provide an important starting point for discussions with diverse rural older people about what is important and what constitutes reasonable access within their community.
If we have learnt anything from this difficult year, then post-COVID recovery must include a broader approach to ageing that extends beyond residential aged care to a focus on healthy ageing. That means better support for people to age in place.
Age-friendly communities enable older people to continue to make significant economic and social contributions to families and communities. However, this can’t occur unless local places plan for all ages and abilities from the beginning.
One of the most concerning things that happens in any recession is the spike in unemployment. The COVID-19-induced recession in Australia and around the world is no exception – other than perhaps the magnitudes involved.
Being out of work is distressing, even in advanced economies with a social safety net (like Australia). Welfare payments rarely, if ever, replace the full loss of income from employment.
In many countries, such as the US, unemployment benefits expire after a certain period of time. This puts the unemployed at risk of being destitute. In Australia (and other countries) receiving unemployment benefits requires proving you are actively looking for work. These obligations can be quite onerous, even if well-intentioned.
Worse still, being unemployed can tilt the scales against an employer offering you a job.
As MIT and Harvard economists Robert Gibbons and Lawrence Katz noted in a landmark 1991 paper, if employers have some discretion over whom to lay off – as is often the case – the labour market will rationally infer that laid-off workers are less desirable employees.
High unemployment also leads to what economists call “labour-market scarring”. This means all those starting work in a bad labour market can suffer long-term economic effects. Either because they don’t get on the job ladder as early as they would have, or because they start off in a job that doesn’t build their skills as well as would have been the case in a strong economy.
Rarely has Australia’s unemployment rate fallen below 5%
These effects can be significant and are of particular concern during this pandemic, as University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson has pointed out in an excellent paper on how to mitigate those effects.
Finally, a job also has non-financial benefits. As US presidential candidate Joe Biden has rightly reminded us, a job is about more than a paycheque:
It’s about dignity. It’s about respect. It’s about being able to look your kid in the eye and say everything will be okay.
All of this points to why policy makers need to make low unemployment one of their core missions.
This involves central banks using monetary policy to reduce unemployment and smooth out the business cycle, and governments using fiscal policy to boost demand when it is flagging.
Searching for jobs
That said, there are two important imperfections in labour markets that make some amount of unemployment inevitable. The first is that employers and employees need to be matched together. This involves workers searching for the right job – a process that takes time.
As Peter Diamond, awarded the 2010 Nobel prize in economics for his pioneering work on “search theory”, has observed:
We have all visited several stores to check prices and/or to find the right item or the right size. Similarly, it can take time and effort for a worker to find a suitable job with suitable pay, and for employers to receive and evaluate applications for job openings.
Indeed, searching for better matches between employers and employees is an important contributor to labour market efficiency. As Diamond noted, in the US on average 2.6% of employed workers have a different employer a month later. Some people spending some time unemployed is part of a healthy labour market.
A second important friction was pointed out by another Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz (joint winner of the economics prize in 2001 for his work on asymmetric information).
Efficiency wages
That is, employers might not want to pay their workers the bare minimum they can get away with. Paying above market – what is called an “efficiency wage” – can induce workers to work harder and more efficiently, because the prospect of losing their job is even more painful.
Another way to think about this was offered by George Akerlof (co-winner of the 2001 Nobel economics prize with Stiglitz and A. Michael Spence).
Akerlof brought insights from sociology into economics by viewing the contract between employers and employees as, at least in part, about “gift exchange”. As he put it:
According to this view, some firms willingly pay workers in excess of the market-clearing wage; in return they expect workers to supply more effort than they would if equivalent jobs could be readily obtained (as is the case if wages are just at market clearing).
What is ‘full employment’?
These frictions in the labour market mean full employment, practically speaking, is not zero. It’s almost surely not 1% or 2%, either. The level depends, in part, on how brutal we are willing to make being unemployed. It also depends on the level of the minimum wage.
I, for one, am glad Australia does not cut off unemployment benefits after 16 weeks (as in the US state of Arkansas) and consign the jobless to abject poverty. I’m also glad Australia’s national minimum hourly wage is A$19.84 (about US$14) – double the US federal minimum of US$7.25.
Does that make unemployment higher here than in countries that take a harsher approach? It does. But it also makes us a more compassionate and empathetic society that takes human dignity seriously.
So when federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said a few weeks ago that once Australia’s unemployment rate is “comfortably below 6%” the task of “budget repair” should begin, I gasped.
If “comfortably below” means something like 4%, then fine.
Because of the labour market frictions mentioned above, and our approach to unemployment benefits, it’s going to be hard to get unemployment much below that in Australia.
But the idea we should tolerate unemployment of, say, 5.5% in normal times is, frankly, intolerable. Monetary and fiscal authorities should use all the firepower at their disposal to avoid that outcome.
Having survived starvation and been spared execution, my father arrived in this new country, vassal-eyed and sunken-cheeked. I was born less than a month later and he named me Alice because he thought Australia was a Wonderland. Maybe he had vague literary aspirations for me, like most parents have vague infinite dreams for their babies, so small, so bewildered, so egoless. I arrived safe after so many babies had died under the regime created by a man who named himself deliberately after ruthless ambition — Political Potential, or Pol Pot for short.
“There was a tree,” my father told me when I was a teenager, “and this tree was where Pol Pot’s army, the Khmer Rouge, killed babies and toddlers. They would grab the infant by their ankles and swing them against the trunk and smash them again and again until they were dead.”
When I was an adult, I found out that there was not just the one tree. There were many such trees from which no cradle hung.
Alice Pung.Author provided
But as a child, growing up in Australia, the oldest of four, I knew the words to comfort crying babies. They’d been taught to me by my schoolteachers, with rhyme but without reason: when the bough breaks the cradle will fall and down will come baby, cradle and all. A gentle song to rock my sisters to sleep. If my mother understood the words I was singing, she’d yell at me.
My mother was always hollering at me about one thing or another. After the age of eight, I was never left in peace. She repeatedly told me that babies had really soft skulls, that there was even a hole in their heads that hadn’t yet closed. When I looked at my baby sister, I could see something pulsing on the top of her scalp, beneath the skin. Never drop a baby, they warned me, or your life will be over. They spoke in warnings and commands, like Old Testament sages. They’d seen babies dropped dead. Their language was literal, not literary, but it did the trick.
We could not complain that we were dying of boredom because they’d seen death close-up, and it was definitely not caused by a lack of Lego. We could not say that we were starving because at one malarial point in his life, my father thought that if he breathed inwards he could feel his backbone through his stomach. We could never be hungry or bored in our concrete house in Braybrook, behind a carpet factory that spewed out noxious methane smells that sent us to school reeking like whoopee-cushions.
‘We could never be hungry or bored in our concrete house in Braybrook.’Tom Rumble/Unsplash
But in this scatological suburb, I was indeed often bored shitless. Imagine this — you go outside and hoons in cobbled-together Holdens wind down their windows and tell you to Go Back Home, Chinks. So you walk home and inside, it’s supposed to be like home. But it’s not a home you know.
It’s a home your parents know, where the older siblings look after the younger ones and your mum works in an airless dark shed at the back making jewellery, and you think it’s called outworking because although she’s at home she’s always out working. Just like her mum in Phnom Penh and her mum’s mum in Phnom Penh and every other poor mum in the history of your family lineage.
“What are you doing here? Stop bothering me,” your mum would tell you. Or when she was desperate, she’d be cajoling: “Take your siblings out. Go for a walk. If you give me just one more hour, I’ll be done.” Her face would be blackened, her fingers cut. She’d have her helmet on, with the visor. She looked like a coal miner.
Back in Cambodia, the eldest siblings looked after the bevy of little ones, all the children roaming around the Central Market, en masse. Here, in these Melbourne suburbs they’d call it a marauding Asian gang, I bet. I preferred to stay at home. I had plenty to keep me occupied there. Our school library let me borrow books, but I can’t even remember the names of the librarians now. They didn’t like some of the kids because sometimes we stole books.
The school librarians ‘didn’t like some of the kids because sometimes we stole books.’Rabie Madaci/Unsplash
My best friend Lydia read a book about Helen Keller that so moved her, so expanded her 10-year-old sense of the world that she nicked it and stroked the one-line sample of Braille print on the last page until all the raised dots were flat. I nicked books too, books on needlecraft and making soft toys. Sometimes one of my aunts would come by and give us a garbage bag filled with fleecy fabric offcuts from her job sewing tracksuits in her own back shed.
Being a practical kid who bugged her parents at every opportunity possible for new toys, I wanted to have reference manuals on how to make them. I didn’t nick story books or novels because to me, those were like films I often only wanted to experience once.
One day, my baby sister rolled herself off the bed when I was supposed to be watching her. She was three months old. I had just turned nine. My mother ran into the house and railed at me like a dybbuk, “You’re dead! You’re dead!” She scooped my sister out of my hands. “What were you doing? You were meant to watch her!”
“She was asleep,” I sobbed, “I was reading a book.”
‘If this wasn’t the high life, then what was?’Annie Spratt/Unsplash
While my mother was working to support us in the dark back shed, I had been in the sunlit bedroom, staring for hours and hours on end at little rectangles, only stopping occasionally to make myself some Nescafé coffee with sweetened condensed milk. If this wasn’t the high life, then what was? Those books were not making me any smarter, she might have thought. Or even said, because it was something she was always telling me, because she couldn’t read or write herself. The government had closed down her Chinese school when she was in grade one, as the very first step of ethnic cleansing in Cambodia.
My mother called up my father and roared over the phone for him to come home immediately because I’d let my sister roll off the bed and she might be brain-damaged. “If she’s brain-damaged, you’re going to be dead,” my father said to me, before they both left for the hospital with my sister.
I hated my parents at that moment, but I hated myself more. I also hated the Baby-Sitters Club, all of those 12-year-old girls for whom looking after small children was just an endless series of sleepovers and car-washes and ice-cream parties and they even always got praised and paid for it. The only people I did not hate were my siblings. They were blameless.
‘The only people I did not hate were my siblings. They were blameless.’Charlein Gracia/Unsplash
This fucking reading, I thought, because this is how I thought back then, punctuated by profanity, because this is how I wrote back then in diaries I made at school of folded paper stapled together with colourful cardboard covers that I’d then take home and fill in with pages and pages of familial injustice. Sometimes the pen dug in so aggressively underlining a word of rage that I’d make a cut through the paper five pages deep. And this is how the kids talked at school, and also some of their parents who picked them up from school. But then I also realised, reading’s the only fucking good thing I have going for me.
It showed me parents who were not only reasonable, but indulgent. They were meant to be friends with their kids. They were meant to foster their creativity and enterprise. They hosted parties and baked cupcakes and laughed when their children messed up the house, and sat them down and explained things to them carefully with great verbal displays of affection. But only if the kids were like Kristy or Stacey or Dawn in the Baby-Sitters Club.
If they were anything like me, then they didn’t talk very much. We were refugees in school textbooks, there for edification, to induce guilt and gratitude. The presence of third-world people like us in a book immediately stripped that book of any reading-for-pleasure aspirations. We were hard work. We were Objects not Subjects. Or if subjects, subjects of charity and not agents of charity. Always takers, never givers. No wonder people resented us.
‘The presence of third-world people like us in a book immediately stripped that book of any reading-for-pleasure aspirations.’Joseph Gonzalez/Unsplash
Hell, even I resented us! “Girls are more responsible,” my mother always told me. When my aunties dumped their children, my little cousins, with me, they’d always say, “Alice is so good. We trust her.” What’s one or two or three more when you already have so many in the house? they reasoned.
I imagined if some prying interloper had called the cops on my parents when I was young, seeing our makeshift crèche with no adult supervision around. “If you tell the government what I do,” my mother always warned me when I was a child, “they’ll take me away and lock me up and your brother and sisters will be distributed to your aunts and uncles or be put in foster homes.”
What she did — her 14-hour days in the back shed, working with potassium cyanide and other noxious chemicals to produce the jewellery for stores that would then pay her only a couple of dollars per ring or pendant — she thought was a crime. She got paid cash in hand, so she never paid any taxes. She just didn’t understand that she wasn’t the criminal; she was the one being exploited.
My mother began work at 13 in a plastic-bag factory, after her school was closed down. When all the men were at war, the factories were filled with women and children. One afternoon, she told me, she accidentally sliced open a chunk of her leg with the plastic-bag-cutting machine. She had to stay home for the next two weeks. She spent those two weeks worrying whether she’d be replaced by another little girl. In her whole working life, spanning over half a century, my mother has never signed an employment contract because she can’t write or read.
‘My mother began work at 13 in a plastic-bag factory, after her school was closed down.’Arisa Chattasa/Unsplash
“People can rip me off so easily,” she would often lament, “that’s why I have to have my wits about me at all times.” She’d always count out the exact change when she went grocery shopping even though it mortified me as a kid, and drove those behind her in line nuts. “If they overcharge me and you’re not here, how can I explain anything to them?” she’d ask, “I don’t speak English.”
She’d memorise landmarks when driving, because she couldn’t read street signs. During elections, she would put a “1” next to the candidate who looked the most attractive in their photo. And she’d ask me to read the label on her prescription medicines.
“Tell me carefully,” she’d instruct, “too much or too little and you could kill me.” The power over life and death, I thought, not really a responsibility I wanted at eight. But power over life and death is supposed to be what great works of art are about. Sometimes, there’s not a huge chasm between being literate and being literary. They are not opposite ends of a continuum.
Sure, I enjoyed the classics, especially that line in Great Expectations when Pip determines that he will return a gentleman and deliver “gallons of condescension”. But the depictions of working children, children treated as economic units of labour, as instruments for ulterior adult ends – this was nothing new to me.
‘Looking after children is hard work.’Free To Use Sounds/Unsplash
Looking after children is hard work. No one cares when things go right, it is the natural course of the universe. But everyone swarms in when things go wrong. A whole swat team, sometimes consisting of your own extended family members, ready to whack at you like a revolting bug if harm should befall your minor charges. The sad reality is that when you slap a monetary value onto these services, people sit up.
They pay attention. They first splutter about how outrageous it is. Then slowly they accept it. You hope that one day no children will be left at home, minding other children while their parents work, because all working parents will be able to access good, affordable childcare.
Often when people rail, think of the children! they are not really thinking of the children. Otherwise, they would listen to the children, not condemn the parents for situations beyond their control — illiteracy, minimum wages, poverty.
Jeanette Winterson wrote about art’s ability to coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous. It involves just seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. To understand that an eight-year-old can and will take responsibility and care of themselves when left to their own devices requires imaginative empathy, not judgement.
Reading showed me what the world could be. My life told me what the world was. It was not Jane Eyre or Lizzie Bennet or even Nancy Drew that opened my life to the possibility of a better existence. It was Ann M. Martin and her Baby-Sitters Club. That children should get paid was a crazy idea, that they should get paid for babysitting even more audacious.
That a handful of pre-teen girls could start a small business from Claudia’s home — beautiful artistic Asian Claudia Kishi with her own fixed phone line — and that they could muster all the neighbourhood children under their care and largesse was revolutionary to me.
In my life, the miraculous does not involve magic. There is nothing that makes the state of childhood particularly magical. There is a lot that is frightening, brutal and cruel about every stage of life. After all, I know that a single tree can harbour a cradle or a grave. But to be able to do what my hardworking, wonderful mother never could — time-travel, mind-read, even never to mistake dish detergent for shampoo because the pictures of fruit on the bottle are similar — this is a gift I will never take for granted.
Anticipating reactions to political attacks can be a tricky business.
When Scott Morrison spectacularly trashed the reputation of Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate over her now-notorious gift of Cartier watches to high-performing employees, he assumed “quiet Australians” would be outraged at the largesse in a government-owned business.
Whether they are will be tested in the focus groups. But the prime minister almost certainly didn’t anticipate Australia Post’s small-business stakeholders, as well as some top-end-of-town voices and conservative commentators, would come out so strongly for Holgate.
Many Post franchisees are furious over the attack – because the deal with three big banks for which the employees were rewarded propped up their businesses.
At the other end of the wealth spectrum Marcus Blackmore, major shareholder in the well-known health empire where Holgate was preciously chief executive, told The Australian the way she’d been treated was “bloody disgusting”. He added, as testament to her business ability, “Blackmores’ business has been dismal since Christine left”.
Morrison has also received a hiding from commentators such as News Corp’s Terry McCrann who labelled him an “outrageous misogynist”.
Assuming Morrison did not have some prior agenda against Holgate before the revelations about the watches at Senate estimates, he has put the government in a bind by acting on the spur of the moment.
He’s called an inquiry that will cost a deal more than the nearly $20,000 value of the Cartier gifts. On Thursday Holgate’s lawyer was weighing into the argument, which raises the spectre of a costly legal fight.
Regardless of the inquiry’s findings, Holgate’s position is near impossible. Presumably she will end up out of Australia Post, sparking a search for a new CEO just when the business is facing upheavals caused by COVID. In the unlikely event she remained, she’d be damaged and relations with the government beyond awkward.
On a very different front, the parliamentary motion moved by Labor this week to congratulate Victorians for overcoming the COVID second wave is also a notable case study in the vagaries of reaction.
By far the strongest speech in the brief debate was from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. A Victorian, he highlighted the costs of the lockdown and attacked the Andrews government, saying “it all comes back to the failures in hotel quarantine, for which we still do not have any answers”.
The speech won both high praise and deep condemnation. Critics variously saw it as an assault against Victorians, the wrong tone on a day of celebration, and a distasteful exercise in politicking.
The backlash revealed not just the sharp divisions over the Andrews government’s COVID handling, but also the intensity of feelings.
Only a misreading could portray Frydenberg’s speech as an attack on the people of the state. His first line was: “The Victorian people have been magnificent”; what he said subsequently did not undermine that sentiment.
Whether negatives should have been put aside on such a positive day is a matter of opinion, but there wasn’t anything confected about Frydenberg’s sentiments. He has been genuinely angry for months about the state government’s mistakes, highly cognisant of the economic damage but also concerned about the mental health implications (remember, his mother is a psychologist).
Where his speech was at fault was not in calling attention to the origin of the second wave, but in narrowing the blame for how it panned out.
The Andrews government – its quarantine bungle and its inadequate contact tracing – must absolutely wear blame. But the Morrison government must assume its share too. Most of the hundreds of deaths were in aged care, which comes under the federal government (intersecting with the state government, which is responsible for public health). The residential aged-care sector was simply not up to the task of protecting those living in it, as the royal commission has pointed out.
With Melbourne now entering (according to some retailers) an early Christmas mood as it comes out of lockdown, Andrews can expect to maintain for the immediate future the solid support he’s enjoyed, mistakes not withstanding.
But there are two major challenges ahead for him.
One is to ensure there is not another wave, which means the Victorian health system needs to be (finally) up to scratch. On Thursday NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, talking about when she might open her border to Victorians, said it would take a couple of weeks to test the robustness of that system.
The other challenge is how Andrews responds when the inquiry into hotel quarantine reports, which surely must make very tough findings. The premier has pushed aside many questions, saying he wouldn’t pre-empt the investigation.
On Thursday the inquiry was extended. There will be an interim report on November 6 with recommendations for a proposed quarantine program.
But the findings on the botched hotel quarantine program will be delayed until the final report, now due December 21. That’s uncomfortably close to the holidays which, however, must not be used by the state government as political cover.
Facing an election on Saturday, Queensland Labor Premier Annastacia Pałaszczuk has been claiming her opponents would have left her state vulnerable to a second wave like Victoria’s by opening the border.
The Queensland poll will be the first COVID electoral test for a state government (we’ve had territory elections).
Before COVID, the Pałaszczuk government appeared in considerable trouble. During the pandemic, its chances improved substantially, with the border closure very popular. Recently, Labor has become more nervous.
The Liberal National Party would have to win some nine seats in net terms for majority government. Labor would be pushed into minority government if it lost a net two seats.
Pałaszczuk, who’s been under attack from the federal government for months over her border, is using her record on COVID as a very large crutch.
Berejiklian this week said (unhelpfully for the LNP) that Queensland Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington “has been very open … that she would have opened to NSW, and I commend her for that position”.
But it is notable this isn’t Frecklington’s current public line. She is assuring voters she’d rely on the health advice in determining border policy.
Such is thought to be the political potency of COVID.
If Labor suffers a serious knock in Queensland, the result will be interpreted as the likely beginning of the end for COVID’s role as a protective vaccine for incumbents. If COVID is seen to have shielded Pałaszczuk, that will further embolden the states, which have become extremely assertive during the pandemic.
Anticipating reactions to political attacks can be a tricky business.
When Scott Morrison spectacularly trashed the reputation of Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate over her now-notorious gift of Cartier watches to high-performing employees, he assumed “quiet Australians” would be outraged at the largesse in a government-owned business.
Whether they are will be tested in the focus groups. But the prime minister almost certainly didn’t anticipate Australia Post’s small-business stakeholders, as well as some top-end-of-town voices and conservative commentators, would come out so strongly for Holgate.
Many Post franchisees are furious over the attack – because the deal with three big banks for which the employees were rewarded propped up their businesses.
At the other end of the wealth spectrum Marcus Blackmore, major shareholder in the well-known health empire where Holgate was preciously chief executive, told The Australian the way she’d been treated was “bloody disgusting”. He added, as testament to her business ability, “Blackmores’ business has been dismal since Christine left”.
Morrison has also received a hiding from commentators such as News Corp’s Terry McCrann who labelled him an “outrageous misogynist”.
Assuming Morrison did not have some prior agenda against Holgate before the revelations about the watches at Senate estimates, he has put the government in a bind by acting on the spur of the moment.
He’s called an inquiry that will cost a deal more than the nearly $20,000 value of the Cartier gifts. On Thursday Holgate’s lawyer was weighing into the argument, which raises the spectre of a costly legal fight.
Regardless of the inquiry’s findings, Holgate’s position is near impossible. Presumably she will end up out of Australia Post, sparking a search for a new CEO just when the business is facing upheavals caused by COVID. In the unlikely event she remained, she’d be damaged and relations with the government beyond awkward.
On a very different front, the parliamentary motion moved by Labor this week to congratulate Victorians for overcoming the COVID second wave is also a notable case study in the vagaries of reaction.
By far the strongest speech in the brief debate was from Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. A Victorian, he highlighted the costs of the lockdown and attacked the Andrews government, saying “it all comes back to the failures in hotel quarantine, for which we still do not have any answers”.
The speech won both high praise and deep condemnation. Critics variously saw it as an assault against Victorians, the wrong tone on a day of celebration, and a distasteful exercise in politicking.
The backlash revealed not just the sharp divisions over the Andrews government’s COVID handling, but also the intensity of feelings.
Only a misreading could portray Frydenberg’s speech as an attack on the people of the state. His first line was: “The Victorian people have been magnificent”; what he said subsequently did not undermine that sentiment.
Whether negatives should have been put aside on such a positive day is a matter of opinion, but there wasn’t anything confected about Frydenberg’s sentiments. He has been genuinely angry for months about the state government’s mistakes, highly cognisant of the economic damage but also concerned about the mental health implications (remember, his mother is a psychologist).
Where his speech was at fault was not in calling attention to the origin of the second wave, but in narrowing the blame for how it panned out.
The Andrews government – its quarantine bungle and its inadequate contact tracing – must absolutely wear blame. But the Morrison government must assume its share too. Most of the hundreds of deaths were in aged care, which comes under the federal government (intersecting with the state government, which is responsible for public health). The residential aged-care sector was simply not up to the task of protecting those living in it, as the royal commission has pointed out.
With Melbourne now entering (according to some retailers) an early Christmas mood as it comes out of lockdown, Andrews can expect to maintain for the immediate future the solid support he’s enjoyed, mistakes not withstanding.
But there are two major challenges ahead for him.
One is to ensure there is not another wave, which means the Victorian health system needs to be (finally) up to scratch. On Thursday NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, talking about when she might open her border to Victorians, said it would take a couple of weeks to test the robustness of that system.
The other challenge is how Andrews responds when the inquiry into hotel quarantine reports, which surely must make very tough findings. The premier has pushed aside many questions, saying he wouldn’t pre-empt the investigation.
On Thursday the inquiry was extended. There will be an interim report on November 6 with recommendations for a proposed quarantine program.
But the findings on the botched hotel quarantine program will be delayed until the final report, now due December 21. That’s uncomfortably close to the holidays which, however, must not be used by the state government as political cover.
Facing an election on Saturday, Queensland Labor Premier Annastacia Pałaszczuk has been claiming her opponents would have left her state vulnerable to a second wave like Victoria’s by opening the border.
The Queensland poll will be the first COVID electoral test for a state government (we’ve had territory elections).
Before COVID, the Pałaszczuk government appeared in considerable trouble. During the pandemic, its chances improved substantially, with the border closure very popular. Recently, Labor has become more nervous.
The Liberal National Party would have to win some nine seats in net terms for majority government. Labor would be pushed into minority government if it lost a net two seats.
Pałaszczuk, who’s been under attack from the federal government for months over her border, is using her record on COVID as a very large crutch.
Berejiklian this week said (unhelpfully for the LNP) that Queensland Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington “has been very open … that she would have opened to NSW, and I commend her for that position”.
But it is notable this isn’t Frecklington’s current public line. She is assuring voters she’d rely on the health advice in determining border policy.
Such is thought to be the political potency of COVID.
If Labor suffers a serious knock in Queensland, the result will be interpreted as the likely beginning of the end for COVID’s role as a protective vaccine for incumbents. If COVID is seen to have shielded Pałaszczuk, that will further embolden the states, which have become extremely assertive during the pandemic.
Indonesian special forces are turning West Papua into “more of a hunting ground”, warns an exiled Papuan leader in response to the shooting of protesting university students this week.
More than a dozen students were wounded in the crackdown in the Papuan capital, Jayapura, on Tuesday with witnesses claiming Indonesian troops opened fire to disperse a peaceful rally, reports Virginia Langeberg of SBS News.
A young man was also severely beaten during the rally, according to video clips broadcast by SBS World News and shared widely on social media.
Months of fresh demonstrations have gripped the region as thousands of indigenous West Papuans renew calls for an independence referendum amid repression in the Indonesian-ruled Melanesian provinces.
Some 13 university students were injured in Jayapura on Tuesday, with victims and witnesses claiming Indonesian troops opened fire to disperse a peaceful rally of about 20 people.
Cause of tension Indonesia’s control of the provinces has long been a cause of tension among indigenous locals with low-level conflict and independence movements simmering for decades.
Despite a heavy military presence in the region and the threat of covid-19, demonstrations calling for an independence referendum reignited in July.
It came after hundreds of thousands rallied in August and September of 2019, only to be silenced by a flood of more armed troops.
The mounting death toll of West Papua’s latest escalation in violence has seen Australia being pressured to take a stronger stance.
Emergency in Jayapura, West Papua. At least one West Papuan student shot today by Indonesian security forces at peaceful protest to refuse Indonesian colonial special autonomy and demand REFERENDUM on independence.
It’s estimated up to 70,000 people have been displaced and 250 killed in the past two years of violence.
Victor Yeimo from the West Papua National Committee said action would continue.
“Our message is very clear, West Papuan people need a political solution,” Yeimo said.
“We’re calling on our Melanesian and Pacific leaders to upgrade its resolution to get the people of West Papua free from colonial power.”
For West Papuan refugees who fled to Papua New Guinea in the 1970s, there is still hope they will one day be able to return.
“We will stay in PNG for the rest of our life, or if West Papua independence is decided, we go back to our home,” said Olof Wayabgkau, who fled Jayapura in 1975.
SBS News contacted the Indonesian embassies in Sydney and Canberra but did not receive a response.
Four speakers from West Papua and Indonesia will take part in a New Zealand webinar with the theme “#PapuanLivesMatter” hosted by West Papua Auckland Action on Sunday, November 1, 4pm. The speakers taking part are lawyer Veronica Koman, Papuan musician and activist Ronnie Kareni, KNPB international spokesperson Victor Yeimo and Papuan human rights worker Rosa Moiwend.
North-central New South Wales today is known for its arid, drought-prone climate. During the Cretaceous period, however, it was a lush coastal floodplain with a high diversity of vertebrates including dinosaurs, crocodiles, turtles and soaring pterosaurs.
New insights gleaned from opalised teeth, found near the town of Lightning Ridge, are now helping paint a picture of the most enormous dinosaurs to ever roam the planet: sauropods.
Our work, published today in the journal Lethaia, reveals up to three different sauropod species once lived in the region, feeding at different heights within the forest canopy.
Scintillating and sizeable specimens
Opalised fossils are natural casts made entirely out of opal. While they generally don’t preserve the original organism, they do preserve its shape.
In Lightning Ridge, opalised fossils are a rich source of palaeontological information. For decades, miners have excavated these fossils — including the sauropod teeth we studied — from deep underground its opal fields.
The sauropods were a group of dinosaur species with markedly long necks, long tails and a herbivorous diet. Potentially weighing up to 90,000 kg, they were the largest animals to have ever walked the Earth.
For our study, we examined 25 sauropod tooth fossils aged between 95-100 million years old. From these, we identified five “morphotypes”, or tooth-shape categories. Several features of a tooth can define its morphotype, including its symmetry, the presence or absence of grooves and wear patterns.
Humans have multiple morphotypes within their mouths, such as molars for grinding, incisors for nipping and canines for grasping. But unlike humans, we know all the teeth of sauropod species would have served similar functions and would have thus had little variation.
This is good news for us, because it means we can be pretty confident sauropod tooth fossils with different shapes came from different species.
Five sauropod teeth fossils (not to scale) showing the diversity of tooth shapes found at Lightning Ridge. The fossils have different colours since they’re all made out of opal.Timothy Frauenfelder
We interpreted three of the five morphotypes in our fossil collection as coming from the upper jaw and the other two from the lower jaw. By comparing our fossils with those from more completely studied sauropods, we were able to link them with at least three distinct species that would have cohabited the area around what is now Lightning Ridge.
While we couldn’t assign the 25 tooth fossils to specific species (as we’d need more than just teeth to identify a dinosaur species), we do know all the teeth belonged to a large group of sauropods known as Titanosauriformes.
This group included the late Jurassic Brachiosaurus, which famously reared-up on its hind legs in the 1993 movie Jurassic Park.
You may remember this iconic Brachiosaurus scene from Jurassic Park.
Also, one of the morphotypes likely came from a later subgroup of Titanosauriformes, called Titanosauria. This group contained species such as the truly gigantic dinosaurs Argentinosaurus and Patagotitan.
A tooth tells the truth
Tooth fossils aren’t only useful to gauge past diversity, but also to infer diets of long-extinct animals. The dietary link is evident since teeth are the primary tool for obtaining and processing food.
When studying teeth, one way we can interpret diets is through looking for “microwear”. This refers to an assortment of small features found on teeth from tooth-to-food or tooth-to-tooth contact.
These features can be preserved in tooth fossils as scratches or pits visible on worn surfaces. Specifically, the ratio of scratches to pits can indicate the grittiness, or smoothness, of a dinosaur’s diet.
More pits means more grit (dust minerals) in the diet. This shows feeding took place closer to the ground. Conversely, more scratches indicates a diet of smoother food, such as foliage, found higher in the forest canopy.
While microwear patterns of North American sauropods have been extensively researched, this is the first time they’ve been observed in sauropods from Australia.
From our collection, two tooth fossils had preserved microwear features. The others were either not worn or had their microwear features obliterated during the opalisation process.
Interestingly, the fossils that did preserve microwear also had different morphotypes. This suggests at least two of the three sauropod species that once roamed NSW were able to coexist by consuming different food within the forest canopy.
One species had a higher proportion of scratches than pits, so it likely fed on soft vegetation between 1-10m above the ground. The other had a higher proportion of pits, which suggests it ate harder vegetation less than 1m above the ground.
Our research may have been limited to teeth, but it demonstrates even incomplete fossils can provide key insights into the lives of long-extinct creatures.
Importantly, it discloses the fascinating sauropod diversity that once inhabited New South Wales, previously identified only in Queensland.
Much like animals today, we believe their coexistence would have depended on them eating different foods in the same area. This would have led to a colourful, cosmopolitan dinosaur landscape in a past, much different, Australia.
After close to a decade of globe-spanning effort, the genome of the southern right whale has been released this week, giving us deeper insights into the histories and recovery of whale populations across the southern hemisphere.
Up to 150,000 southern right whales were killed between 1790 and 1980. This whaling drove the global population from perhaps 100,000 to as few as 500 whales in 1920. A century on, we estimate there are 12,000 southern right whales globally. It’s a remarkable conservation success story, but one facing new challenges.
A southern right whale calf breaches in the subantarctic Auckland Islands.University of Auckland tohorā research team, Author provided
The genome represents a record of the different impacts a species has faced. With statistical models we can use genomic information to reconstruct historical population trajectories and patterns of how species interacted and diverged.
We can then link that information with historical habitat and climate patterns. This look back into the past provides insights into how species might respond to future changes. Work on penguins and polar bears has already shown this.
But we also have a new and surprising short-term perspective on the population of whales breeding in the subantarctic Auckland Islands group — Maungahuka, 450km south of New Zealand.
Spying on whales via satellite
Known as tohorā in New Zealand, southern right whales once wintered in the bays and inlets of the North and South Islands of Aotearoa, where they gave birth and socialised. Today, the main nursery ground for this population is Port Ross, in the subantarctic Auckland Islands.
Adult whales socialise at both the Auckland and Campbell Islands during the austral winter. Together these subantarctic islands are internationally recognised as an important marine mammal area.
It matters where tohorā feed and how their populations recover from whaling because the species is recognised as a sentinel for climate change throughout the Southern Hemisphere. They are what we describe as “capital” breeders — they fast during the breeding season in wintering grounds like the Auckland Islands, living off fat reserves gained in offshore feeding grounds.
Females need a lot in the “bank” because their calves need a lot of energy. At 4-5m at birth, these calves can grow up to a metre a month. This investment costs the mother 25% of her size over the first few months of her calf’s life. It’s no surprise that calf growth depends on the mother being in good condition.
Females can only breed again once they’ve regained their fat capital. Studies in the South Atlantic show wintering grounds in Brazil and Argentina produce more calves when prey is more abundant, or environmental conditions suggest it should be.
The first step in understanding the relationship between recovery and prey in New Zealand is to identify where and on what tohorā feed. The potential feeding areas for our New Zealand population could cover roughly a third of the Southern Ocean. That’s why we turn to technologies like satellite tags to help us understand where the whales are going and how they get there.
Where tohorā go
So far, all tracked whales have migrated west; away from the historical whaling grounds to the east near the Chatham Islands. As they left the Auckland Islands, two whales visited other oceanic islands — skirting around Macquarie Island and visiting Campbell Island.
It also seems one whale (Bill or Wiremu, identified as male using genetic analysis of his skin sample) may have reached his feeding grounds, likely at the subtropical convergence. The clue is in the pattern of his tracks: rather than the continuous straight line of a whale migrating, it shows the doughnuts of a whale that has found a prey patch.
Migratory track of southern right whale Bill/Wiremu, where the convoluted track could indicate foraging behaviour.
The subtropical convergence is an area of the ocean where temperature and salinity can change rapidly, and this can aggregate whale prey. Two whales we tracked offshore from the Auckland Islands in 2009 visited the subtropical convergence, but hundreds of kilometres to the east of Bill’s current location.
As Bill and his compatriots migrate, we’ve begun analysing data that will tell us about the recovery of tohorā in the past decade. The most recent population size estimate we have is from 2009, when there were about 2,000 whales.
I am using genomic markers to learn about the kin relationships and, in doing so, the population’s size and growth rate. Think of it like this. Everybody has two parents and if you have a small population, say a small town, you are more likely to find those parents than if you have a big population, say a city.
This nifty statistical trick is known as the “close kin” approach to estimating population size. It relies on detailed understanding of the kin relationships of the whales — something we have only really been able to do recently using new genomic sequencing technology.
Global effort to understand climate change impacts
Globally, southern right whales in South Africa and Argentina have bred less often over the past decade, leading to a lower population growth rate in Argentina.
Concern over this slowdown in recovery has prompted researchers from around the world to work together to understand the relationship between climate change, foraging ecology and recovery of southern right whales as part of the International Whaling Commission Southern Ocean Research Partnership.
The genome helps by giving us that long view of how the whales responded to climate fluctuations in the past, while satellite tracking gives us the short view of how they are responding on a day-to-day basis. Both will help us understand the future of these amazing creatures.
The current governance/management crisis at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, ASIC has seen a deputy chairman resign and the chairman step aside under a cloud.
It might have arisen simply because of lax internal accounting, compliance, and reporting procedures regarding payments (larger than those approved) benefiting the chairman and deputy chairman (a bad look for a regulator).
Or it might reflect something more substantive about whether the way ASIC is set up is consistence with good governance.
The financial system inquiry set up by the Coalition after taking office examined the governance structure of ASIC in 2014. I was one of members of the inquiry.
ASIC’s governance (and also that of Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and other statutory authorities) is built around a “commission” structure.
A small group of full-time executives (appointed by the government as “commissioners” and one designated as the “chairman” or chief executive) are responsible for both the governance and management of the organisation.
This contrasts with the conventional corporate structure found in the private sector where a board (in theory appointed by the shareholder owners, but often a self-perpetuating “mates club”) is separate from the day-to-day management of the business which is undertaken by the chief executive and other full-time employees.
The board is responsible for monitoring company performance, determining strategy (including approving funding plans), and hiring and firing the chief executive.
We considered carefully the best way to run ASIC
In considering the governance structure we noted that a board structure involving part-time external directors was put in place when the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority was established in 1998 but discarded after a few years.
Why not? Well, it is very hard to imagine the federal treasurer giving up the powers to appoint (and sack) the chief executive, determine the funding level, and set mandates and performance objectives. In practice the board would have little to do.
In fact all that would really be left would be monitoring the performance of the regulator.
While the regulators are required to report to the minister and are monitored in other ways (including by the audit office) we came to the view that a separate overarching Financial Regulator Assessment Board (FRAB) would be the best way to oversee the performance of all of the regulators.
Although the treasurer could do this, we came to the view that in practice things would slip under that treasurer’s radar.
It was one of the only two (out of 44!) recommendations rejected by the government.
But it has resurfaced as a recommendation of the Hayne royal commission into misconduct in the banking, superannuation and financial services industries.
Recommendation 6-14 is for the establishment of a new oversight authority, differing in some details from our recommendation, but otherwise similar.
In its response to the Hayne report the government accepted this recommendation, despite having earlier rejected ours.
Consultation on draft legislation to set up such a body took place in early 2020, but the bill has not yet been brought to parliament.
Whether having such an oversight authority will help resolve ASIC’s internal management and governance failings is an open question.
The current structure isn’t helping
In the 2015 ASIC Capability Review (led by Karen Chester – subsequently appointed as an ASIC Commissioner), a significant recommendation was to “realign its internal governance structure to achieve a clear separation of the non-executive (governance) and executive line management roles”.
The primary focus of the commissioners would become “setting the strategy of the organisation and supervising overall delivery and performance against the strategy, along with making, and taking ultimate responsibility, for key regulatory decisions”.
The proposed assessment authority wouldn’t help with uncovering compliance failings such as those prompting the current crisis – they remain the responsibility of the auditor.
Our idea could help put it right
But it would help with the broader goal of ensuring ASIC is working well.
Its remit would include how ASIC’s governance and management arrangements enable it to achieve the mandate and performance expectations set for it by the government.
Whether the government will go beyond a knee-jerk reaction to the current scandal and actually adopt such a more considered approach is anyone’s guess!
Yoko Ono once noted: “people respect wizards. But a witch, my god, we have to burn them”.
Witches were maligned for centuries because of their perceived dark power and influence — but could this fear have stemmed from their commercial success?
Witches have been savvy business women since the 13th century, when they flourished in the seaside towns of Scotland, England and Finland.
Today, witchy toys, crystals, and potion kits are big business and the craft has even cast its spell on some global brands.
Some 800 years ago, superstitious sailors would seek out sea witches to purchase wind knots — magical ropes bearing three knots. Untying one was believed to bring a breeze, two a stronger wind and three to cause a gale.
When women were killed during the witch hunts of the Early Modern period around 1450 to 1750, sailors sought other methods to control the wind. But villagers who couldn’t afford doctors were more dependent on them.
Many witches were excellent healers despite being banned from practising medicine in the 13th century. They offered a variety of treatments that are still found in drugs today. These include willow bark for inflammation (aspirin was developed from a chemical found in the willow tree), garlic for cholesterol (though research on its efficacy is inconclusive) and flying ointment of henbane, nightshade and mandrake. While we don’t use it for flying now, the plant henbane contains hyoscine used for motion sickness and nightshade contains atropine, a muscle relaxant.
Portrait of La Voisin by Antoine Coypel (1661–1722), calling her a ‘source of so many evils’.Met Museum
In 17th century France, witches could earn a grand living selling love potions and poisons. Catherine Deshayes, also known as La Voisin, amassed a fortune selling women potions to poison a spouse or competitor — including selling to Louis XIV’s mistress. She also provided abortions. Deshayes was burned at the stake in 1680.
Witch hunters often treated independent women with suspicion. Between 1620 and 1725 in New England, 89% of women put on trial for witchcraft were wealthy, with no male children nor male siblings to share in their inheritance.
Pagan rituals to social media
Deshayes was a satanist. The wind sellers were pagan because they did not adhere to Christian beliefs. Yet they led the way to the development of the Wicca form of modern witchcraft in the mid-20th century.
In 1954, Gerald Gardner, considered the founder of modern Wicca, published the book Witchcraft Today and founded his first coven.
By 2014, the Pew Research Center estimated almost 1 million Americans identified as Wiccan or pagan.
Spiritual pathways come with accoutrements, whether they be rosary beads, incense, or crystals. So, like the wind knots sold to 13th century sailors, witchcraft has enduring revenue potential.
Catholics have rosary beads; witches have crystals.Joanna Kosinska/Unsplash
On dark moonlit nights, Renate Daniel, a small business owner and witch from Newcastle, can be found working either in a cemetery in Wollombi, New South Wales, laying flowers on gravestones while showing tourists on a ghost tour, or assisting in a paranormal investigation.
Witchcraft for most practitioners isn’t all about commerce. Donnellan says she has “a few people in the freezer” — meaning she has worked spells meant to keep negative energy away by putting someone’s name in a bag, filling it up with water and freezing it.
The American psychic services industry — including palm readers, mediums and astrologists — is worth US$2.2 billion (A$3.2 billion), mostly from small businesses.
Savvy witches are thriving on the internet. #witchtok on TikTok has had over 5.3 billion views, and #witchesofinstagram has more than 5.5 million posts. You can buy over 400,000 products tagged “witch” on Etsy, from candles to spell bottles to pentagram necklaces.
Corporate witchcraft
It isn’t just cottage psychics and online influencers getting in on the act. Large corporations are exploring the mystical — with mixed success.
The Ouija Board, a tool witches and spiritualists said helped them commune with spirits, was patented in 1891 by the Kennard Novelty Company. Within a year, the company grew from one factory in Baltimore to two in Baltimore, two in New York, two in Chicago and one in London. By 1967, the patent was in the hands of toy company Parker Brothers and annual sales reached 2 million — more than Monopoly.
In 2018, cosmetics giant Sephora launched their US$42 “Starter Witch Kit”, containing sage, tarot cards and rose quartz. After witches around the globe decried it as cultural appropriation, Sephora pulled the product from the market.
Tarot cards are no longer consigned to speciality stores.Jen Theodore/Unsplash
This controversy hasn’t dissuaded other corporations. Last year Airbnb offered fall equinox rituals as holiday experiences. Urban Outfitters sell smudge sticks, tarot cards and crystals in their US stores and witch hat incense holders in Australian outlets. Booktopia sells tarot cards.
Witches can also claim globally recognised marketing iconography in the form of the black hat. Though COVID has put a dampener on Halloween, Americans are still expected to spend US$8 billion on the holiday with pagan roots.
The commercialisation of witchcraft has allowed modern witches to prosper financially without the fear of being burned at the stake, drowned or tortured. Now, having come out of the broom closet, there is no going back.
Many Melburnians are joyous at the prospect of a return to socialising, as the city regains some old freedoms this week following significantly eased coronavirus restrictions.
Social media is teeming with images of people looking ecstatic about the end of lockdown.
But in stark contrast to these images, some people might feel nervous about socialising or going out again — especially those who were anxious before the pandemic. If you feel like your social skills are a bit rusty, you might feel more comfortable at home. And the fear of another lockdown might also make you want to avoid going out altogether.
And on top of these, there’s a raft of new and often complicated rules to understand, which can be overwhelming and draining. Then there’s the stress and pressure of making plans and having busy schedules again.
However, it’s important to remember there are ways to cope.
It’s helpful to remember you’re in an unusual situation with no perfect map of how to cope, or a “right” or “wrong” way to get through it. For most people, the anxiety will naturally ease over time. It’s normal to feel anxious, nervous, apprehensive, and even overwhelmed, and equally normal to find yourself feeling excited or joyous. It’s also OK to take your time and slowly ease back into how things were before the lockdown started.
It’s OK to say no to some events or situations if you don’t feel comfortable with them at first.
However, if you’re shy or nervous in social situations, avoiding social situations completely can make it worse. The more we avoid, the scarier socialising becomes, and the less chance we have to discover we often cope better than we expect.
To build your confidence, it can be helpful to take it step by step, using the principles of exposure therapy. Begin by socialising with people you feel more comfortable with, and then gradually building up to larger crowds, such as in shops, pubs or other large venues.
It’s also useful to be conscious of negative thoughts that make you feel more anxious, and learn techniques to challenge and change these thoughts into more realistic or helpful ones that help you feel more confident. Cognitive behavioural therapy teaches you practical techniques to manage anxious thoughts, and is available online.
Even though some people are eager to get back to socialising, not everyone is. And that’s OK.James Ross/AAP
Coronaphobia
Melbourne has conquered its second wave of COVID-19 and is now seeing very low new daily case numbers, with a 14-day rolling average of just 2.4.
Although the risk of contracting COVID-19 is now much lower, it’s normal to still feel some anxiety about contracting it, or worry about unwittingly spreading the virus to your loved ones. The invisible nature of the virus, and the fact it can be spread by people without symptoms, is what’s had public health authorities and epidemiologists so concerned. And with a lot of exposure to public health messaging to stay safe and protect yourself and the community, it’s easy to have internalised these messages so much that the outside world feels dangerous.
Our research at the Black Dog Institute with 5,070 Australian adults showed that while many feared contracting COVID-19, it was also common to worry about loved ones getting it.
It’s normal to feel a bit worried about COVID-19, as you return to restaurants, pubs, cafes and workplaces. But there are some signs to look out for that your worries might be getting out of hand, and that it’s time to seek some help.
If you find it hard to stop worrying, the worries are persistent or intense, you constantly check yourself for symptoms, you actively avoid certain situations, you’ve become overly obsessive about decontaminating surfaces or your clothes, or if anxiety interferes with your life, you might find it helpful to chat to a psychologist. The best place to start is to talk to your GP to get a referral to a psychologist, or you can complete a brief online assessment to get evidence-based treatment recommendations, such as the Black Dog Institute’s Online Clinic.
There are also ways you can manage these anxieties, including by reducing the time you spend reading media reports about the virus, avoiding googling about the virus, and learning ways to help you feel safe, but also work towards returning to normal at a pace you feel comfortable with.
Managing fear of another lockdown, anxiety about socialising, and fear of COVID-19 are all happening on top of rules like remembering to bring your mask with you and wear it. And no doubt many business owners and staff will be stressed about maintaining hygiene and ensuring their venues are COVID-safe.
There are undoubtedly good reasons for these rules. But processing, internalising, and remembering the various rules can be draining, and put more cognitive load on people who may already feel tired, uncertain, stressed and overwhelmed.
It can help to learn techniques to break down what feels overwhelming into smaller, more manageable steps, and to write things down (like the rules!) so you’re not overloading your already taxed memory. It might also help to learn ways to combat stress, such as improving your sleep habits, doing physical activity, learning relaxation techniques, and sharing how you’re feeling with others so you feel supported and not alone.
Go a bit easier on yourself if you’ve been expecting too much of yourself, or are too self-critical. It also helps to take breaks away from work, and from stressful situations, including smaller mini-breaks during the day, but also longer breaks like a holiday.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Angela Fitzgerald, Associate Professor of Science Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of Southern Queensland
Mesmerised by the cats of YouTube? Tumbled down the rabbit holes that are Insta Stories? Horrified by the US presidential debate, but kept watching regardless?
You are not alone.
Visual narratives have a powerful hold over us and, like the metaphoric train wreck, we are finding it increasingly difficult to look away. We often tend to bring a level of healthy scepticism and questioning to the stories we read or hear. But if we “see” the story, we are far less critical and more likely to be drawn to jump on board and go along for the ride.
As the train continues to run away, we need to pay significantly more attention. We need to question the value and quality of the visuals that constantly filter through our feeds and devices.
Reclaiming documentary from the dark side
The genre of documentary has a particularly important role to play. Thanks especially to the prolific work of David Attenborough and the like, we are now hardwired to connect with real-life stories as a form of indisputable truth.
In contradiction, we need to acknowledge the darker side of documentary and its ability to misinform. To have any hope of preventing conspiracies derailing the train, we need to sharpen the focus on quality documentary processes.
We first used documentary filmmaking as a process to inform an educational research project in 2018. We supported five graduate teachers to record their lived experiences by creating video journals as they embarked on their first year in the profession. The journals were curated as a documentary film, Mapping the Messiness, and provide compelling insights into their individual journeys.
Predictably, the visual product that evolved draws the viewer in and strongly connects them with the experiences of the graduates. It is difficult to avoid being deeply moved by their stories. Yet beneath this compelling surface lies a rigorous application of quality criteria that guided our interactions with the graduates.
Our learnings from this experience highlighted that the key factors informing a quality visual story are two-fold. It is about, firstly, supporting the storytellers to voluntarily share their own stories and, secondly, ensuring their input is clearly valued and conveyed in the final product.
We have entered an era where it is vital to apply ethical standards in the capture and curation of visual stories. By applying quality criteria, we introduce a framework that invites peer review, which strengthens the ethical basis of the approach. The opinions and feedback of others provide a way to ensure the credibility and authenticity of the documentary.
Awareness of the need for such an approach is increasing. Changes to ethical codes and practices to counter fake news in our visual streams are being seen in countries like, for example, New Zealand. Collectively, these are steps to avert the consequences of the runaway train.
A recent legal case in New Zealand dismissed an attempt to block the use of a documentary film, developed by an independent current affairs organisation, as evidence. This legal precedent confirms visual storytelling is a legitimate means of delivering evidence and should be considered as a credible source.
This documentary was accepted as evidence at a New Zealand inquiry into the removal of Māori children from their families.
We will continue to be faced with train wrecks in our visual world and will continue to find it hard to draw our eyes away. That is OK. It is part of human nature. But, if we are to have any hope of minimising the wreckage, we need to be reassured that visual stories can be credible and honest. To achieve this, we need to continually question and challenge the quality of the visual content we consume.
In January, the International Court of Justice ruled unanimously that Myanmar must take all measures to prevent acts of genocide against the Rohingya minority by its military and police forces.
Since then, Amnesty International has questioned whether Myanmar has been fully transparent in its reporting on its compliance with the order. And Human Rights Watch has argued the steps Myanmar has taken so far have not gone far enough to prevent genocide.
Last month, Canada and the Netherlands gave the concerns of the international community a major boost when they announced they would intervene in the ICJ proceedings
to prevent the crime of genocide and hold those responsible to account.
Australia has maintained military, diplomatic and trade relationships with Myanmar since the ICJ case was brought against it. If Myanmar is not fully complying with the order, this puts Canberra in a tricky position.
Should Australia follow the lead of the Canadians and Dutch and use its legal weight in the ICJ to ensure Myanmar complies with its obligations under international law?
Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi appears before the International Court of Justice last year.KOEN VAN WEEL/EPA
What the UN Genocide Convention says
The case against Myanmar was brought to the ICJ in November by the tiny African nation of The Gambia, alleging Myanmar had carried out mass murder and rape and destroyed the communities of the Rohingya in Rakhine state.
The UN Genocide Convention of 1948 requires states to take measures to prevent and punish the crime of genocide.
Prevention must include averting any preparation, complicity in, or commission of genocide. And punishment is reserved for those who commit genocide, as well as those who conspire to commit or incite genocide, or are complicit in the act.
This is not merely an idealistic aim but requires practical steps to be taken by states. According to German scholar Björn Schiffbauer, this means
measures of prevention need to start as early as possible, which may include taking mere measures of precaution whether or not there is any known specific genocidal danger.
Myanmar, which is a party to the Genocide Convention, was effectively put on notice by a UN fact-finding mission in 2018, which collected extensive evidence of acts committed by the armed forces (known as the Tatmadaw) against the Rohingya, including
the killing thousands of Rohingya civilians, as well as forced disappearances, mass rape and the burning of hundreds of villages.
Has Myanmar abided by the ICJ order?
In May, Myanmar submitted its first report to the ICJ on its compliance with the order to prevent genocidal acts against the Rohingya, ensure the military and police do not commit genocide, and preserve any evidence of previous genocidal acts.
This report has not been publicly released, but news outlets have suggested it was based on directives issued by Myanmar President Win Myint’s office in April.
According to Human Rights Watch, the directives are not enough to protect the Rohingya, particularly as they only appear to focus on the armed forces. A careful read also shows none of the directives appear to refer to preventing complicity.
In international law, both complicity and conspiracy can involve the commands and conduct of a range of actors, including political and military leaders, as well as third-party groups under their control or influence.
Amnesty believes Myanmar is in breach of the ICJ order. This ought to cause the Australian government severe concern, particularly as Australia has maintained trade and military ties with Myanmar.
Australia has placed sanctions and travel bans on five generals named in the UN fact-finding report, but not the commander in chief, General Min Aung Hlaing.
Australia also has an arms embargo in place for Myanmar. However, it has not placed sanctions on some Tatmadaw-controlled or foreign-owned companies that do business in or with Myanmar.
This was recommended by the UN fact-finding mission on its sanctions list.
Rohingya refugees at a camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.Shafiqur Rahman/AP
What Australia should be doing
When Canada and the Netherlands indicated their intention to intervene in the case against Myanmar, they said they specifically wanted to provide assistance to the ICJ
with the complex legal issues that are expected to arise and … pay special attention to crimes related to sexual and gender-based violence, including rape.
Australia could assist in a similar way, particularly with regard to interpreting how the duty to prevent genocide works under international law. This could include whether states or foreign individuals would be considered complicit by maintaining trade or military ties with Myanmar.
These legal questions should also compel Australia to give serious consideration to checking its relationship with Myanmar.
In January, Min Aung Hlaing received the Australian ambassador, Andrea Faulkner, for a diplomatic visit, during which they exchanged gifts and discussed various topics. This included the provisional measures decided by the ICJ, according to a press release.
But the statement also stressed the “improved relations between Myanmar and Australia”, including cooperation between their armed forces.
Australia would be unlikely to breach its obligations under the Genocide Convention by simply maintaining diplomatic relationships with Myanmar. And in principle, continuing high-level diplomatic relationships with Myanmar may be instrumental in compelling it to comply with the ICJ order.
However, it could be argued providing support in the form of military aid and the benefits of trade could compromise Australia’s duty to use all reasonable means to prevent genocide in Myanmar — if this encourages or assists those who should be held accountable for past crimes.
Australia’s current position is a concern. It could be improved greatly by joining the ICJ proceedings to clarify where the duty to prevent genocide ends and complicity begins, and how to ensure that Myanmar complies with the court orders.
About 400 squatters in Papua New Guinea watched helplessly as excavators demolished their homes and properties to make way for the construction of a K100 million four-lane road outside the capital of Port Moresby.
Police were present to ensure that the court-ordered eviction at 14-Mile on the border of the Moresby North East electorate and the Kairuku-Hiri district of Central was carried out by the National Capital District Commission (NCDC) on Tuesday.
Assistant Police Commissioner Anthony Wagambie Jr, the police commander for Central and NCD, said police would be involved only if evictions were ordered by the court.
“The eviction at 14-Mile instituted by the NCDC and police was only following what is in the court order,” he said.
“Police are not carrying out the eviction.
“I have directed that they provide security and ensure it is done peacefully.
“We understand that over a period of time people have built houses on the land.
‘Police have a duty’ “But police have a duty to enforce the court order or be held in contempt otherwise.”
National Capital District Governor Powes Parkop had earlier met with representatives of the settlers.
“The settlers were given a notice in 2018. At that time there were not many settlers.
“We had plans for the initial settlers but instead of cooperating with us they took us to court,” he said.
The families confronted Moresby North East MP John Kaupa who they claimed had promised them they would not be evicted.
Last month, the settlers sought a stay order on the eviction from the court.
But on September 21, the NCDC was allowed by the court to go ahead with the eviction.
It ordered the squatters to vacate the piece of land and not to threaten, interfere, disrupt and harass NCDC officers.
The families accused Kaupa of giving them “false hope” last week that they would not be evicted.
But Kaupa assured them he had done everything he could to stop the eviction.
He advised them to see Parkop and Moresby South MP Justin Tkatchenko.
Landowner Rachael Keaka said she could not believe that the government was evicting her from her ancestral land.
The Pacfic Media Centre republishes The National articles with permission.
Hi I’m Selwyn Manning and you are watching A View from Afar.
As always, we are joined by political scientist and former Pentagon analyst… Paul Buchanan… and this week we will discuss:
How United States Secretary of Defense, Mike Pompeo, has this week been traveling around South East Asia. He has signed a new defence deal with India, at a time when India and China relations are digressing.
Also, ASEAN (Association of South East Asia nations), for years has been considered a paper tiger. But now it member states are sharpening their claws with help from the USA.
So what is Pompeo’s plan? What’s the end-game here? Is it simply a new move to contain China’s dominance and growing authoritarianism? Is the Trump Administration being drawn out from its isolationism by China’s expanding presence in the region?
INTERACTION: Remember, if you are joining us LIVE via social media (SEE LINKS BELOW), you can make comments and include questions. We will be able to see your interaction, and include this in the LIVE show.
You can interact with the LIVE programme by joining these social media channels. Here are the links:
The Greens are at a crossroads. The direction they take in the next few days may have significant consequences, not just for the country and the shape of the Government, but also for the future of the Greens themselves.
Currently, the Labour and Green negotiating teams are behind closed doors coming up with a deal, which will then be taken to Green Party delegates on Friday night to endorse or reject. This requires 75% of Green delegates to agree.
It’s high stakes, because any deal taken to members is non-negotiable and likely to put the Greens either into government (with ministers outside of Cabinet) or afford them a looser arrangement with less responsibility. Rejecting Labour’s offer would put the Greens outside of government power. Whatever option is chosen will come with both costs and rewards, and will likely open up divides within the party membership.
Why Labour wants the Greens
There is an assumption that Labour doesn’t need or want the Greens as part of the Government because Jacinda Ardern already has a majority of votes in Parliament. Any inclination to include the Greens in a Labour-led government is being viewed by some as magnanimous or kind. For the best explanation for why this couldn’t be further from the truth, see John Armstrong’s latest column, Don’t mistake Ardern’s talks with Green Party for kindness.
According to Armstrong there are two reasons that Labour strategically wants the Greens within the government: “First, [Ardern] wants to keep the Greens in the position she has reserved for them – namely, firmly under her thumb. Second, as much as it is the desire of any Prime Minister to be freed to run a single-party Government unencumbered by minor party partners and the constant compromises that entails, opinion polls have revealed that up to half of the electorate are averse to all power residing in just one party. It is therefore in her interests to convey the impression she is sharing power.”
Armstrong points out that Jacinda Ardern is generally ruthless when it comes to the electoral interests of her party, and this was often in evidence during the election campaign. And ultimately any offers from Labour to the Greens will be underpinned by Labour having all the leverage, with Ardern saying “take it or leave it. It is important to Ardern’s self-styled image as a consensus-building politician that she be seen to make an offer. If the Greens don’t accept it, then too bad. She won’t be losing any sleep.”
What is likely to be offered to the Greens
Essentially the possible offers boil down to either ministerial positions outside of Cabinet, or some looser arrangement that involves less governing power for the Greens but also with more independence for the minor party.
The latest speculation is that Labour will only offer two ministerial positions: for co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson. Having Davidson with ministerial power would be very useful for selling the deal to party activists, who generally want to see Davidson have greater influence, especially because they trust her more to keep to the more radical traditions and principles of the party. So, it would be an apt move by Ardern to offer a promotion to her.
Such an offer would be less than what the Greens got after the last election, and would mean current ministers Eugenie Sage and Julie Anne Genter would be demoted. David Williams writes about this today, saying a demotion for Sage, while retaining Shaw, would suggest that Labour wanted to shift more towards the centre in this new term: “Showing Sage the door, however, would speak volumes about our next Government’s potential embrace of pragmatism and incrementalism” – see: A tale of two Green ministers.
Williams’ argument is that Sage, as Minister of Conservation and of Land Information, has been prepared to “rock the boat”, while Shaw has been more centrist: “Where they differ, perhaps, is Shaw’s willingness to cut a deal – seemingly against Green ideals. This time last year, Shaw backed an agreement with farm leaders for the agriculture sector to self-manage its methane emissions. As political website Politik put it, Shaw staked his political reputation on it, as he defied his own party’s election manifesto and a recommendation from the Interim Climate Change Commission.”
In another article, Williams also reports the view of Kevin Hague (former Green MP, now head of Forest & Bird), who says this about the dangers of Sage being dropped: “Whoever they put in would have 10 percent of the experience, knowledge, and skill that Eugenie Sage has in that portfolio area. So imagine that minister’s next three years if Eugenie Sage is not in the government and is instead critiquing what the government’s doing. If you start thinking through the practicalities, it’s strongly in Labour’s interest to actually do a deal that works.”
One option supposedly being considered by the Labour-Green negotiators is what Ardern has called a “consultation agreement”, which is what the Greens signed up to with Helen Clark in 2005. This “saw the Greens not committed to supporting Labour on confidence and supply but consequently without any Ministerial positions” – see Richard Harman’s Greens’ high stakes game carries a big risk. In this arrangement, “The Government promised to consult with the Green Party on a range of issues”.
For more speculation on how the negotiations are going, see leftwing blogger Martyn Bradbury’s The latest from the Green-Labour negotiations. He suggests the talks aren’t going so well, with Labour currently offering little, and the Green membership getting ready to reject it.
Why the Greens should stay out of the new Government
It might be in the interests of the Green Party to stay out of Labour’s new government. This point of view is well explained by David Williams in his article, Why standing apart is good for the Greens. He suggests the party will be more able to “keep their distinctive voice, and can raise their voice when they disagree”. And he reports the view of former co-leader Russel Norman (now of Greenpeace) who says “You can influence things from the outside” and he’s highly critical of what the party achieved during the last coalition by being inside the tent: “They were in the Government and achieved very, very little.” He argues that the party also had to “defend the indefensible” such as keeping farmers out of the emissions trading scheme.
Long-time leftwing commentator Gordon Campbell has also put forward the arguments for the Greens retaining their independence: “The Greens barely survived this last term in government. Signing up again could well be suicidal, long term. It might have made sense if the voters had delivered a sufficient number of Green MPs to make them essential for Labour to govern. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the Greens are just an optional extra. That’s a major problem” – see: On why the Greens shouldn’t join the government.
Campbell sees the Greens in Government being swamped and silenced, and getting the blame for the shortcomings of the next three years: “Arguably, the Green Party can (a) better defend their principles, (b) retain their identity and (c) be a more feisty advocate against Labour timidity and Act Party populism alike, from a position outside of the tent.”
He believes the Greens risk becoming a party of insiders, disconnected from their community activism, and that the lessons the Greens should be taking are instead from the significant victory in Auckland Central: “Chloe Swarbrick won Auckland Central by running on the track carved out by the Green Party of old – as an outsider against two machine politicians from two virtually indistinguishable parties of the mainstream. She didn’t run as an insider promising incremental change. If the Greens turn their back on the Auckland Central example and settle for relative impotence inside government they will put themselves right back in the MMP danger zone again in 2023.”
Blogger No Right Turn also says that the last term in Government wasn’t a successful exercise for the party, and by going into government again they risk simply “implementing and overseeing Labour policy” – see: The Greens and Labour.
This all comes at a cost: “Being a good team player means not criticising your political partners, and in particular, not spending the next three years reminding Labour’s supporters and voters generally of what the government could or should be doing. Which is fine, if you’re actually getting real policy out of it. But its not something you give away for nothing, or next-to-nothing (which is what the Greens arguably got last term).”
Former Green MPs are also speaking out publicly to warn the party not to fall into the trap of government. Keith Locke told RNZ that they should “remain critical of Labour while also working constructively with it” – see: Green Party should avoid Cabinet positions and remain an independent, critical voice – former MP. According to Locke, inside government his party “would not have any leverage and there would be an implicit understanding that the Green caucus would soften its criticism of the Labour government.”
Similarly, Catherine Delahunty went on RNZ to say: “I think the greens should go hard for independence right now and not become subsumed into any form of deal with Labour that actually mutes their ability to speak out” – see: Greens better off independent – Former Green MP Catherine Delahunty. The former MP believes the party shouldn’t take any ministerial positions and should instead focus on pressuring the Government to be more transformational: “She said the Greens became too risk-averse in the previous term when the party was part of the government and what she wants to see is some radicalism from the new MPs.”
Party activist Justine Sachs says entering into government would mean “selling out the party’s soul”, and they are better to focus on work outside of Parliament and government: “Let’s focus on building power, not just electorally but in unions and social movements. Labour has a mandate, but its pivot to the right suggests that the mandate will not be spent on the kind of transformative change necessary. It is up to the Greens to push Labour left, and this will be far easier to do from the outside in opposition, where they are allowed an independent and critical voice” – see: The Green party should think twice before accepting a deal with Labour.
The difficulty of the decision was clearly outlined by Matthew Hooton on the day after the election. He suggested the party is in a bind, as it either has to throw its lot in with the “Ardern juggernaut” and potentially neutralise itself, or stay out of government and be powerless – see: Triumphant Greens face difficult choice on Government role (paywalled). The decision is highly fraught: “if the Greens get the decision wrong, in last night’s triumph may well lie the seeds of a disaster in 2023.”
Here’s Hooton’s case for the Greens staying out of government: “The radicals will rightly point out this also involves existential political risk. When push comes to shove, the Greens will still have no real power over Labour, but their ministers will be bound by Cabinet collective responsibility, obliged to publicly support decisions they don’t agree with. Green ministers will be in danger of doing little more than applying a Green stamp to Labour’s agenda, to the extent it turns out to have one.”
Why the Greens need to be part of the new Government
In the above column, Hooton also makes the case for the Greens taking up a role in government: “Outside the Government, they are no more than a taxpayer-funded pressure group with the use of Parliament’s platform. That may be enough for the radical side of the Green coalition but its other supporters want outcomes. For wiser heads, the Greens have no real choice but to opt for a more formal agreement with Labour, assuming Ardern offers one. To have any real power at all, they need to be ministers who operationally control departments and budgets, and attend Cabinet committee meetings as equals with their Labour rivals.”
BusinessDesk’s Pattrick Smellie acknowledges there is a risk for the Greens in entering government by having ministers outside of Cabinet, but says there are also risks with abstaining: “if the Greens sit on the cross-benches without influence and snipe for three years, they risk just as much being blamed for failing to exert maximum constructive influence without being suffocated in the embrace of a formal coalition. After all, if the climate emergency is so urgent, how is it served by three years of tactical and ultimately impotent Opposition? On balance, it is very difficult to see how the Greens can do other than seek ministerial posts under arrangements that will look very similar to the confidence and supply agreement reached after 2017” – see: Labour and the Greens: an inevitable embrace (paywalled).
Manning’s main point is that abstentionism would jeopardise the newfound position of Green power: “to shy away from an opportunity to assert its core environmental and climate policies, to abandon the ability to inject itself into the new Executive Government’s priority policy settings – then it would relegate itself into legislative insignificance and potential political oblivion by 2023. It would also pay-waste to the ministerial experience, gains and momentum that its members of Parliament established during the 2017-20 term.”
Similarly, see Rod Oram’s What the Greens could bring to a two-party government. He argues that the “Greens could play two important roles in a two-party government: more innovative ideas than Labour has offered, and strong ministerial talent”.
Every day we are likely to interact with some form of artificial intelligence (AI). It works behind the scenes in everything from social media and traffic navigation apps to product recommendations and virtual assistants.
AI systems can perform tasks or make predictions, recommendations or decisions that would usually require human intelligence. Their objectives are set by humans but the systems act without explicit human instructions.
As AI plays a greater role in our lives both at work and at home, questions arise. How willing are we to trust AI systems? And what are our expectations for how AI should be deployed and managed?
To find out, we surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 2,500 Australians in June and July 2020. Our report, produced with KPMG and led by Nicole Gillespie, shows Australians on the whole don’t know a lot about how AI is used, have little trust in AI systems, and believe it should be carefully regulated.
Most accept or tolerate AI, few approve or embrace it
Trust is central to the widespread acceptance and adoption of AI. However, our research suggests the Australian public is ambivalent about trusting AI systems.
Nearly half of our respondents (45%) are unwilling to share their information or data with an AI system. Two in five (40%) are unwilling to rely on recommendations or other output of an AI system.
Further, many Australians are not convinced about the trustworthiness of AI systems, but more are likely to perceive AI as competent than to be designed with integrity and humanity.
Despite this, Australians generally accept (42%) or tolerate AI (28%), but few approve (16%) or embrace (7%) it.
Research and defence are more trusted with AI than business
When it comes to developing and using AI systems, our respondents had the most confidence in Australian universities, research institutions and defence organisations to do so in the public interest. (More than 81% were at least moderately confident.)
Australians have least confidence in commercial organisations to develop and use AI (37% no or low confidence). This may be due to the fact that most (76%) believe commercial organisations use AI for financial gain rather than societal benefit.
These findings suggest an opportunity for businesses to partner with more trusted entities, such as universities and research institutions, to ensure that AI is developed and deployed in an ethical and trustworthy way that protects human rights. They also suggest businesses need to think further about how they can use AI in ways that create positive outcomes for stakeholders and society more broadly.
Overwhelmingly (96%), Australians expect AI to be regulated and most expect external, independent oversight. Most Australians (over 68%) have moderate to high confidence in the federal government and regulatory agencies to regulate and govern AI in the best interests of the public.
However, the current regulation and laws fall short of community expectations.
Our findings show the strongest driver of trust in AI is the belief that the current regulations and laws are sufficient to make the use of AI safe. However, most Australians either disagree (45%) or are ambivalent (20%) that this is the case.
These findings highlight the need to strengthen the regulatory and legal framework governing AI in Australia, and to communicate this to the public, to help them feel comfortable with the use of AI.
Australians expect AI to be ethically deployed
What do Australians expect when AI systems are deployed? Most of our respondents (more than 83%) have clear expectations of the principles and practices they expect organisations to uphold in the design, development and use of AI systems in order to be trusted.
Most Australians (more than 70%) would also be more willing to use AI systems if there were assurance mechanisms in place to bolster standards and oversight. These include independent AI ethics reviews, AI ethics certifications, national standards for AI explainability and transparency, and AI codes of conduct.
Organisations can build trust and make consumers more willing to use AI systems, when they are appropriate, by clearly supporting and implementing ethical practices, oversight and accountability.
The AI knowledge gap
Most Australians (61%) report having a low understanding of AI, including low awareness of how and when it is used. For example, even though 78% of Australians report using social media, almost two in three (59%) were unaware that social media apps use AI. Only 51% report even hearing or reading about AI in the past year. This low awareness and understanding is a problem given how much AI is being used in our daily lives.
The good news is most Australians (86%) want to know more about AI. When we consider these factors together, there is a need and an appetite for a public literacy program in AI.
One model for this comes from Finland, where a government-backed course in AI literacy aims to teach more than 5 million EU citizens. More than 530,000 students have enrolled in the course so far.
Overall, our findings suggest public trust in AI systems can be improved by strengthening the regulatory framework for governing AI, living up to Australians’ expectations of trustworthy AI, and strengthening Australia’s AI literacy.
Changes to a Victorian law back in February made it an offence to publicly identify victim-survivors of sexual violence. These changes removed the capacity for survivors to give permission for their names or images to be published, as was the case under the previous law.
Now the Victorian government is “fast-tracking” reforms to the gag laws that would reinstate the rights of victim-survivors to speak out about their experiences of sexual violence and the criminal justice response.
But, in the rush to respond, have they got the details right?
What is hidden cannot be changed
There are good reasons to protect the identities of sexual violence victim-survivors. Sexual violence has long been a hidden crime — one that is often gruelling to prove in court. And, for many victim-survivors, it’s difficult to construct a new life that is not defined by their victimisation.
After experiencing a crime that removed their choice and agency, it is vital to ensure media or any other parties do not further intrude on victim-survivors’ lives.
But what if a victim-survivor wants to share their account of sexual violence?
Speaking publicly about their experiences has been an important way that victim-survivors have contributed to societal understandings of the nature of sexual violence. It is also vital in advocacy to improve our justice and support responses.
If sexual violence remains a mostly hidden crime, and one that is poorly understood by many Australians, how can we expect our community attitudes and responses to change?
What went wrong?
The government introduced the gag laws as it sought to address another problem with the law — there was no avenue to overturn a suppression order in a sexual offence case.
But, in addressing this issue for victim-survivors in cases subject to such an order, the government introduced a requirement that all victim-survivors of sexual offences had to seek a court order to be able to speak out. This applied even in cases where the perpetrator had been found guilty of the crime.
The process has proven problematic and expensive. For many victim-survivors, obtaining a court order would be impossible without legal representation to help navigate the court process.
But it is not only the financial cost at issue. For many, the courts are sites of great trauma. Victim-survivors who have had to go through a gruelling trial have referred to the process as a “second rape”. Others never get legal recognition of their experience.
The proposed reforms before the Victorian parliament go some way to restoring the rights of victim-survivors.
First, the bill states the prohibition on publication does not apply where a survivor self-publishes — for example, through social media posts.
The reforms would also allow adult victim-survivors over the age of 18 to give written permission for a third party to publish their identity. Those under 18 will need a doctor, psychologist or other prescribed person to “verify” their permission.
Consultation and reform still needed
While some of these proposed changes are steps towards restoring the agency of victim-survivors of sexual violence, the bill still has some flaws.
The new law states the prohibition on identification applies to both living and deceased victims of sexual offences. Because a deceased person cannot give written permission, naming them would require a court order.
This means the families of women who are raped and murdered cannot publicly name their loved ones without first applying for and receiving a court order. The families of women like Jill Meagher would need a court order to share her story. This also means we would not be able to include her name in an article like this.
Victoria has been plagued by a series of high-profile rape and murders in recent years. Under the proposed laws, Jill Meagher, Eurydice Dixon, Aiia Maarsarwe and other women raped and murdered at the hands of violent men would only be identified through reference to the perpetrator or the crime committed against them.
Keeping the pressure on governments to address all forms of violence against women through campaigns such as Counting Dead Women would not be allowed without a court order application from a family member, where sexual violence featured as part of the homicide.
Media and third-party-generated social media posts wanting to name a victim-survivor would need to seek written permission from them each time. This potentially leaves victim-survivors who have already given permission to share their identity exposed to repeated requests for written confirmation of that permission.
Reforms to the law also raise questions about whether other victim-survivors of sexual violence warrant similar protections. For instance, a UK legal inquiry is considering extending anonymity protections to victims of image-based abuse. Advocates have argued such reforms are vital, as much of the harm is caused through public humiliation and shaming of victim-survivors.
Yet these people too should retain the right to speak about their experience and be identified if they choose. This should also occur without the expense, delay and navigation of a court order process.
These are all difficult matters to get right, and the new reforms are clearly trying to balance the needs and rights of victim-survivors of sexual violence.
However, if we are to respect the dignity and autonomy of victim-survivors, and continue challenging the systemic nature of these harms in our community, we must take the time to get the balance right.
If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault or family violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit www.1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendon O’Connor, Associate Professor in American Politics at the United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney
US President Donald Trump’s path to re-election requires maximising the support of his oft-mentioned “base” — white voters without college degrees — in the key battleground states where he eked out victory in 2016.
This is because Trump’s support among other voters has slipped. According to the Pew Research Centre, he still holds a 60-34% lead over Democratic challenger Joe Biden among whites without a college degree, but Biden has substantial leads among college-educated white voters, as well as Black, Hispanic and Asian voters.
As a result, Trump has a very narrow path to victory that will require high voter turnout by so-called “working-class whites” in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin and Michigan. Based on the current polls, this path is increasingly unlikely.
But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. According to Dave Wasserman, an elections analyst from the Cook Political Report, Trump’s base is key.
In Pennsylvania, for instance, he estimates there are about 2.4 million non-college-educated white voters who did not cast ballots in 2016, but could do so this year. As Wasserman notes,
the potential for Trump to crank up the intensity of turnout among non-college whites is quite high.
Trump has spent much time campaigning in Pennsylvania, a state seen as key to his chance of re-election.Gene J. Puskar/AP
Who are ‘white working-class’ voters?
Whites without a college degree in America are often referred to as the “white working-class”. In truth, this label is used rather loosely.
The “working class” has long been thought of as “blue-collar” factory, trades and construction workers.
But according to US political scientists, the working class today is defined by both education and income levels:
those who do not hold a college degree and report annual household incomes below the median, as reported by the Census Bureau (in 2016, for instance, the median annual household income was nearly US$60,000).
Under this definition, small business owners and various “white collar” workers (those in service jobs) and “pink collar” (jobs traditionally held by women such as caregiving roles) are also considered part of the American working class.
Working-class voters have long played an outsized role in US elections, despite the fact they have been a minority among wage and salary earners since the 1920s.
Working-class voters, particularly those who belonged to unions, were once steadfast supporters of candidates on the political left. These days, however, the left feels largely abandoned by these voters, while the right is increasingly dependent on them to win elections.
As working-class voters have drifted to the right, the labels used to describe them have changed. In the 1970s, they were called “hard hats”. By the 1980s, they were known as “Reagan Democrats”, and in the early 2000s, “NASCAR Dads”.
A Trump rally in small-town Wisconsin this month.KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/EPA
The story of working-class whites abandoning left-wing parties makes for catchy journalistic copy. Each election cycle, there are numerous articles and television vox pops featuring machinists or miners who have moved rightwards, feeling disillusioned with the parties of their parents.
Working-class voters are more complex than we think
The only problem with this narrative is that it is all too neat. In reality, the voting behaviours of the white working class is more complex.
Take for instance Trump’s supporters in the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton. As the data below show, Trump didn’t earn his largest share of votes among the poorest whites in America, but among those in the “middle class” (that catch-all label used to describe everyone between the rich and those living under the poverty line).
More than 10% of white voters with incomes under $30,000 actually voted for a candidate other than Trump or Clinton.
Other factors may also have come into play in 2016 that weren’t related to either income or education.
As this chart shows, non-college-educated voters split their voting preferences evenly between Democrats and Republicans as recently as 1996.
Pew Research Center
An accelerated shift to the right began then, resulting in a remarkable 39% margin of support for Trump over Clinton in 2016. For many scholars, this “diploma divide” was the single most important explanation why Trump won.
But many commentators have also pointed to racism and xenophobia to help explain Trump’s rise among these white working-class voters.
According to Identity Crisis, a widely praised book on the 2016 election, Trump successfully “racialised economics” by promoting to white Americans
the belief that undeserving groups are getting ahead while your group is left behind.
Biden shows empathy with working-class voters, but few new ideas
Have the Democrats tried to woo back these white working-class voters in recent elections?
In recent elections, former President Barack Obama, Clinton and Biden have focused much of their economic rhetoric on industrial and construction employment, even though these sectors only make up 20% of all jobs (the rest are in the services sector).
Biden speaking to union members in Pennsylvania.Andrew Harnik/AP
Most politicians lack the language to explain the reality that most jobs are service jobs. Because of this, it is hardly surprising they also lack good ideas to address unequal wages and poor working conditions within the services sector.
Policies that address economic inequality are the best way to guard against the white working class being drawn to populist figures like Trump. Biden has not offered these voters much more than Clinton did, with the possible exception of more empathy.
But Biden may not need to win over working-class white voters to defeat Trump. With minority voter turnout expected to be high, and fewer white women and elderly voters expected to support Trump, the president’s hopes of winning on a shrinking base are looking ever more remote.
The presidency of Donald Trump has been challenging for New Zealand’s foreign policy. Our commitment to multilateral solutions to global problems has run into a new isolationism in the United States.
Infamously, Trump quit both the World Health Organisation and the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. During a global pandemic and with a looming environmental crisis, US leadership has been missing.
If Joe Biden is elected on November 3, however, some kind of realignment may be possible. New Zealand policymakers will be closely watching several key areas.
Climate and Health
Trump’s exit from the Paris Agreement was significant for the abandonment of the US’s emissions target, but possibly more so for the loss of leadership and financial support needed to encourage sustainability in the developing world.
Biden has even signalled he may use trade agreements to combat global warming. This would be a major change to US trade policy and could have implications for agricultural countries such as New Zealand with methane-rich exports.
Protesters outside the White House respond to Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change.AAP
Trade agreements
New Zealand is committed to free trade and a rules-based international order, but Trump seemed intent on wrecking the World Trade Organisation (WTO), especially after it ruled his ongoing spat with China over trade was wrongful.
Biden may show more restraint on the WTO, but neither he nor Trump is likely to advance a long-desired free trade agreement (FTA), despite the US being New Zealand’s third-largest trading partner.
Trump crushed the previous nearest thing to an FTA, the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA). But he did sign into law a new arrangement making it easier for Kiwi entrepreneurs to work in America.
Although Biden is unlikely to differ from Trump on some trade issues (such as with China), he may revisit the TPPA.
Personality politics: Donald Trump meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un in Korea’s demilitarised zone.AAP
Arms control
The divisions between Trump, Biden and the interests of New Zealand are much greater over arms control treaties. New Zealand’s nuclear-free commitments run counter to the global instability caused by recent US actions.
Trump quit the Open Skies Agreement (designed to allow transparency and verification in monitoring arms buildups), as well as the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Agreement (which kept European short-to-medium-range land-based nuclear missiles in check).
The so-called New START treaty, which controls the 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons held by the US and Russia, now hangs by a thread, with a possible one-year stay of execution beyond its planned expiration date at the beginning of 2021.
Trump also quit the 2015 Iran nuclear accord, despite the fact Iran was complying with its provisions. When the US assassinated Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Iraq, Iran responded by firing missiles at American bases.
Trump opted to stop and not risk bloody regional conflict, but his reckless gamble put New Zealand soldiers stationed in the Middle East at high risk.
Biden would be less volatile. He wants to see if the nuclear deal can be revived. He is also more likely to try to save New START, despite misgivings about Russia.
Anything that prevents the international arms control architecture completely collapsing will benefit everyone. For New Zealand, it would mean the nuclear-free foreign policy was once more in step with global goals.
Flash point: an anti-US demonstration in Iran after the killing of general and commander Qasem Soleimani.AAP
War and peace
Trump has moved three Middle East nations towards normalising relations with Israel, ended American involvement in Syria and has tried to get out of the quagmire of Afghanistan.
He also obtained a promise of denuclearisation from North Korea, although this is an empty promise, more a pause than a sign of peace in an intergenerational problem. Biden may not do much better, but his approach to negotiation would probably differ, moving away from Trump’s personality-driven approach.
Biden would avoid a full exit from Afghanistan and Iraq, fearing the consequences of any resulting power vacuum. He also has a record of strong support for Israel, although he is probably more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than Trump.
Overall, the military and strategic differences between the two White House candidates are not vast. Neither seriously undermines New Zealand’s own foreign policy settings. If there is tension it will probably be over China.
Neither Trump nor Biden is likely to improve US-China relations. If anything, Biden may by more hawkish and push harder for a multilateral approach to punishing China for everything from trade infractions to human rights abuses.
For New Zealand — which is slow to act against China, its biggest trading partner — some of the most difficult foreign policy challenges are yet to come, whoever is in the White House next.
But it is also possible to have (or do) too much of a good thing. In a recent study, we tracked people aged 50 and older from 13 European countries over a two-year period to explore how volunteering, education, involvement in religious or political groups, or participating in sport or social clubs influenced their mental health.
We also looked at how many close social relationships people had — the kind of relationships in which they would discuss important personal matters. We found social activities especially benefited individuals who were relatively socially isolated (with three or fewer close relationships).
For people with a higher number of close relationships, engaging in social activities did not appear to enhance mental health. It could even be detrimental for some.
Who benefits from social activities
Social isolation is a major health issue. Apart from compromising the mental health of isolated individuals, it is linked to many other adverse health outcomes, including dementia, heart disease and stroke and premature death. But people who experience social isolation can take steps to improve their situation – for example, by engaging in formal social activities.
Among individuals who were relatively socially isolated (people with three or fewer close relationships), we found more engagement in social activities was linked to improved quality of life and fewer symptoms of depression.
On a population level, our estimates suggest if such people were to engage regularly in social activities, we would see a 5-12% increase in people reporting better quality of life and a 4-8% reduction in people experiencing symptoms of depression. This would be a substantial change to population mental health, given more than 70% of people in our sample (aged 50+, in Europe) have three or fewer close relationships.
There are many reasons being socially active is linked to better mental health and well-being. Social activities can be a way to establish new relationships, provide opportunities for social support and foster a sense of belonging within a community.
Social activities can increase a sense of belonging within a group.Shutterstock/Syda Productions
When we looked at how the study variables (quality of life, symptoms of depression) mapped against our two variables of interest (number of social activities, number of close relationships), we found U-shaped curves. That is, poor mental health at low levels of social activity, good mental health at moderate levels of social activity, and again poor mental health at high levels of social activity.
Depression appeared to be minimised when people reported having four to five close relationships and being engaged in social activities on a weekly basis. Any more social activity than this, and the benefits started to decline, disappear or turn negative.
This downturn was particularly clear among individuals reporting seven or more close relationships. For these very busy people, engaging in social activities was linked to an increase in depressive symptoms.
Too much social activity can backfire and lead to exhaustion.Shutterstock/Maksim Shmeljov
Because our social capital (essentially the time we have to devote to social interactions) is limited and roughly the same for everyone, extroverts in effect prefer to spread their social efforts thinly among many people. This is in contrast to introverts who prefer to focus their social efforts on fewer people to ensure those friendships really work well.
This trade-off is at the core of our capacity to engage in social activities. If you engage in too many, your social time is spread thinly among them. That thin investment might result in you becoming a peripheral member of numerous groups in the community rather than being embedded in the social centre where you can benefit from the support of your connections.
Another possibility is that too much social activity becomes a stress factor. This can lead to negative outcomes, such as social over-commitment, emotional and cognitive exhaustion, fatigue or feelings of guilt when social relationships are not properly nurtured because of limited time.
This raises another important consideration, albeit one we were not able to investigate empirically in our study. Family is an important part of our social world, not least in terms of the emotional and other support it provides. Devoting too much time to community activities means less time for family. That bottleneck might well prove to be detrimental to well-being because of the strain it could impose on family relationships.
So what’s the take-home message? Perhaps just this: if you want to live a happy and fulfilled life, be actively social — but do so in moderation.
Schools are eligible for $20,280 per year year ($24,336 for remote schools) to appoint a chaplain.
Since its inception by the Howard government in 2006, there have been concerns from many, including parents and education unions, about the religious affiliations of chaplains, and the conflict this presents when they work in secular schools.
It’s worth recapping what’s known about how the chaplaincy program has operated so far, and what alternatives exist.
Are all chaplains religious?
The 2018 agreement on the national chaplaincy program, between the Commonwealth government and all states and territories, sets out that the states must ensure chaplains may be of any faith. States must also ensure chaplains do not proselytise — that is, convert or attempt to convert a student to their religion.
But the agreement also says a chaplain must be “recognised through formal ordination, commissioning, recognised religious qualifications or endorsement by a recognised or accepted religious institution”.
The ACT ended the chaplaincy program in 2019 saying the fact that chaplains must have a religious affiliation is incompatible with the education act. In March 2019, Victoria agreed to change the job description of chaplains to say they could be of any faith or no faith. However, recent reports suggest non-Christian counsellor applicants are still being denied employment in Victoria on the grounds of their faith.
And there have been reports of chaplains being encouraged to promote a Christian theology course to students in NSW.
Under the national agreement, chaplains are required to “respect, accept and be sensitive” to the beliefs of others. But it is possible some chaplains are unable to support children (LGBTIAQ+ students for instance) whose lives do not align with their religious affiliation.
Are chaplains effective?
An independent evaluation of the chaplaincy program — conducted from 2016-17 across government, Catholic and independent schools — concluded chaplains are “highly effective in boosting student well-being”. However, principals said only 30% of children received support from the school chaplain. And only 134 students nation-wide provided feedback.
This means there is still a distinct lack of evidence as to whether the chaplaincy program is effectively supporting children and young people’s mental well-being.
Authors of the evaluation highlighted that staff saw the chaplain as being good at supporting the emotional well-being of students. This included helping students manage relationship issues and to develop self esteem.
But chaplains were seen as less equipped to manage complex student problems. These included alcohol and drug abuse, sexuality, self-harm and suicide, academic achievement, and student exposure to violence, racism and neglect.
These limits are unsurprising, as the role of chaplains under the program is well-being support.
What are the alternatives to chaplains?
A chaplain in the government program must have a certificate IV in youth work or pastoral care. This must include competencies in “mental health” and “making appropriate referrals”. The courses can be completed within 12 months and have no minimum entry requirements.
Schools could employ counsellors, psychologists or social workers instead of chaplains.Shutterstock
In comparison, school psychologists must have a minimum six-year sequence of education, training and supervision. Psychologists are trained in managing students with academic issues, complex personal issues, psychological issues and those related to self-harm and suicide.
Psychologists are relatively expensive in comparison with chaplains, and can be difficult to access due to their demand. The average psychologist salary in Australia is $90,900 per year. This falls well short of the $20,280 offered through the chaplaincy program. It would only be enough for psychologists to work little over one day per week in schools, unless the school supplemented the funding.
Chaplains can also only be employed part-time if schools are not supplementing the government funding.
Schools could employ the less expensive but lesser-trained counsellors. But people aren’t expected to have specific qualifications or accreditation to work as a counsellor in Australia. The average salary for counsellors in Australia is $82,578 per year.
Employing social workers in schools would likely support children and families, particularly those with more complex needs. Social workers in Australia are required to completed a bachelor of social work and are paid an average $85,331 per year.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to our youth mental health crisis. But we do need better regulation of mental health practitioners and further evaluation of the role and impact of psychologists, social workers, counsellors and chaplains in schools.
Our recent research, exploring teenagers’ use of mental health services, noted an under-resourcing of mental health support in schools. Teenagers said there were few mental health services easily accessible to them, and they needed more support from schools.
The 2019 submission to an inquiry into mental health (by a national professional association for school psychologists, school counsellors and guidance officers) recommended schools stop spending money on “staff unqualified to occupy titles in schools if they are ill-equipped for the purpose of professional student mental health support”.
Substantial funding of any program should be linked with rigorous evaluation. Evidence about the extensive mental health and well-being needs of children and young people at school should be considered in any decision on national program funding.
The 2020 federal budget forecasts Australia’s population growth will slow to almost zero over several years because of COVID-19 and related restrictions. This leads to the question: will this period allow the big cities to catch up on infrastructure shortfalls that developed before the pandemic?
One of us recently conducted research on how infrastructure shortages – such as rail lines, open space and affordable housing – linked to Sydney’s pre-pandemic rapid growth arose in the context of government support for a lot more population. The findings gives us some insights into whether an infrastructure catch-up might happen.
The research centred on the consequences for infrastructure provision in Sydney of the vertical fiscal imbalance in Australia. The Commonwealth collects more than 80% of tax revenue while the states rely on the Commonwealth for 45% of their revenue.
The federal government, especially the Treasury, favours population growth. That’s because it generates extra tax revenue, reduces the risk of recession and spreads the welfare costs of an ageing society across a wider base.
The state government is also positive about growth, though less so than the Commonwealth. As a public marker of successful government, growth provides political legitimacy. However, it also requires the state, under the Australian Constitution, to provide most of the infrastructure needed to support that growth.
On the other hand, the Commonwealth garners most of the extra tax revenue from growth. Extra state revenue from a growing population is absorbed into the unavoidable recurrent costs of health, education and so on to service the increased needs. As a result, the state government is unable to fund enough new public infrastructure.
Commonwealth infrastructure funding to the state is only a small fraction of the total required. The federal budget says New South Wales will receive A$2.7 billion from the Commonwealth for infrastructure over the next decade. The state government’s forecast infrastructure spending is more than A$100 billion over the next four years.
The Morrison government is providing only a small fraction of the money NSW spends on infrastructure.Joel Carrett/AAP
As a result, the state needs to call on private sector funding as much as possible. This means infrastructure that can’t be fully paid for by users, such as rail lines, open space and affordable housing, is under-provided. And, as is the case in Victoria, existing assets such as public housing are sold to the private sector.
This context suggests the pandemic-induced flatlining of population growth won’t necessarily allow the infrastructure shortfall to be overcome. Cities are unlikely to catch up unless the Commonwealth greatly increases its funding of state infrastructure.
State budgets rely heavily on growth-sensitive revenue such as property transfer taxes and the GST. And these are set to fall. NSW GST revenue, for example, is forecast to be A$3.5 billion lower this financial year than anticipated before the pandemic.
For states to fund infrastructure beyond user-pay projects like motorways, they have to take on debt to offset reduced taxation revenue. But this will be constrained by their desire to preserve their credit ratings as a marker of good governance.
The federal government is less constrained. The combined influences of ultra-low interest rates and the Reserve Bank’s availability to buy government bonds mean much higher Commonwealth debt is now fiscally tolerable.
The question then becomes: can the Commonwealth’s ability to shoulder increased debt be used to provide the states with more infrastructure funding? The Commonwealth’s huge budgeted outlays to offset the economic impacts of the pandemic are obviously a major constraint on this happening.
Nevertheless, infrastructure projects are generally seen as an important vehicle for responding to the effects of the pandemic. And state government projects count just as much as Commonwealth projects for economic recovery.
However, the federal budget provides little cause for optimism here. The big cities received relatively little infrastructure funding, and certainly very little to overcome current shortfalls.
For instance, the main Sydney project funded was the St Marys-Western Sydney Airport rail line. However no business case for the line has been released, and it is likely to be a decades-long white elephant with little passenger traffic.
A case for more federal funding
The case for more Commonwealth funding of state infrastructure goes beyond helping a post-pandemic recovery. The big cities need funding for public goods such as public housing and mass transport.
The state’s options for raising funding for social housing are limited, but these projects are a badly needed public good.Simon Bullard/AAP
But developing infrastructure of this kind offers limited opportunities for user-pays financing, especially where current shortfalls are significant. These public-good projects range from relatively small projects such as dedicated cycleways to big-ticket items like Sydney’s Metro West and Brisbane’s Cross River Rail, as well as low-job but high-need items like land purchases for new public open space.
The role government played in responding to the pandemic reminded us just how important leadership, accountability and public-sector-led co-ordination are in times of crisis.
Climate change is another crisis that requires such a response, particularly when it comes to infrastructure investment and delivery. Infrastructure that reduces our dependency on carbon involves investment in high-quality public transport, active transport (walking and cycling) and public open spaces.
In some areas the private sector is well placed to deliver greener outcomes. But in areas such as transport, open space and housing, government investment must play a central role. The transformation that the challenges of the 21st century demand of us needs bold leadership from our elected officials.
As our research has concluded, a deep analysis of the costs and benefits of big city population growth for state government finances should provide the basis for a new federal-state financial accord that addresses the imbalance of such costs and benefits between the two levels of government.
The death of Brittney Conway, the three-year-old Gold Coast girl killed by swallowing a button battery, has again drawn attention to deaths and injuries caused by consumer goods – and to a longstanding deficiency in Australia’s consumer safety laws.
About 20 Australian children a week are hospitalised due to swallowing batteries, and three have died since 2013. Preventing such cases was one of the top product safety priorities of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in 2019.
In 2019 a total of about 780 Australians were killed by consumer products, and a further 52,000 injured, according to the consumer watchdog.
Misadventure can never be eliminated, but more safety measures could be implemented. Product makers, for example, could ensure small batteries cannot be easily removed from devices by children.
Consider the 31,000 LED wristbands distributed to spectators at the AFL grand final in Bribane last Saturday. The AFL issued a safety recall on Tuesday, days after child safety group Kidsafe Queensland warned the wristband’s battery compartment, containing two button batteries, was not adequately secured.
The promotional LED PixMob wristband recalled by the Australian Football Commission.www.productsafety.gov.au
The problem, as acknowledged in March 2019 by the consumer watchdog’s head, Rod Sims, is that it is generally not against consumer protection regulations to supply unsafe goods in Australia.
Only a select list of about 44 product types are regulated by mandatory safety standards. These include things such as aquatic equipment, bicycle gear, cots, prams, toys for children aged three and under, and all toys containing magnets, lead and other hazardous elements.
But for thousands of other products, the Australian Consumer Law (ACL) is reactive. Regulators can act only after a problem becomes apparent and enough people are actually or potentially injured or killed.
Sims spelled out the fix by calling on Australian law makers to follow European and other nations by introducing a “general safety provision” obliging firms to be proactive, not reactive, in ensuring they supply safe products.
Sleeping with the Enemy recalled its Summer Mini-Personalised Sleepwear range on October 6 2020. The garments pose a fire risk to the wearer.www.productsafety.gov.au, CC BY-SA
Currently, for any product not covered by mandatory safety standards, Australian suppliers tend to voluntarily recall items found to be unsafe. They do this mainly to avoid compensation claims and reputational risk.
Those harmed can pursue compensation from sellers for breaching consumer guarantees or from manufacturers for product liability. But even big class-action law firms tend to find it easier to bring claims for investors rather than customers.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission can also ban products found to be dangerous, with 19 products currently on its list. These include plastic children’s items containing the chemical diethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP), combustible candle holders and gas masks containing asbestos.
But all this remains a reactive response. Suppliers are only indirectly incentivised to market safe products.
Bubs & Me Boutique recalled this dummy chain on October 26 2020. It poses a strangulation hazard.www.productsafety.gov.au
A general safety provision, backed by financial penalties and other regulatory powers, would require them to supply only safe products, taking into factors such as consumer expectations and industry best practices.
Britain has had such a provision since 1987, and the European Union since 1992. Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Canada and Singapore have followed suit.
Adding a general safety provision to Australian law was canvassed by Productivity Commission inquiries in 2006 and 2008. These found insufficient evidence benefits would outweigh costs, so other legislative reforms should be tried first.
But the 2017 final report of the government’s review of the ACL reached a different conclusion. Noting the Australian market for consumer goods had changed significantly, with many more low-cost imports, it recommended an “overarching general obligation” on traders to ensure the safety of their products.
A general safety provision, the report said, would place “a clear onus” on traders to ensure the safety of the products they sold to Australian consumers:
It would shift responsibility for managing product safety risks from consumers and regulators to traders who are better placed to control those risks at the design and manufacturing stage of a product’s life.
The annual economic cost of deaths and injuries from unsafe consumer is at least A$4.5 billion, estimates the Australian Treasury (which in October 2019 sought submissions on reform options including a general safety provision). This assumes a “value of a statistical life year” of about A$200,000 for premature deaths and disability. There are also A$500 million in direct hospital costs, and further costs associated with minor injuries and property loss.
My own research (and submission to the Treasury) provide evidence supporting a general safety provision.
First, the OECD Global Recalls portal (which tracks product recalls around the world) shows Australia had higher per capita voluntary recalls than Korea, Britain, Japan and the US between 2017 and 2019. Canada’s recall rate was similar, but it has a more stringent duty on suppliers to report product accidents to regulators compared with Australia.
This suggests relatively more unsafe products are making it to market in Australia. About 40% of those recalls involve child products, of which around 60% come from China.
Second, the number of annual recalls has been rising in Australia, as shown by figures compiled by peak advocacy group Choice from government data. The increase from about 2011 is in line with burgeoning online shopping. Greater e-commerce due to the COVID-19 pandemic may add to the numbers.
Further analysis by Catherine Niven and colleagues shows recalls of children’s products increased 88% from 2011 to 2017 (other recalls decreased by 21%). Just as alarmingly, almost two-thirds of the recalls involved products not complying with specific mandatory standards (also demonstrated by two recent recalls pictured above).
Time to put safety first
Regulators could seek to sanction local suppliers more for such non-compliance with existing law.
But introducing a broader general safety provision would create a paradigm shift in how companies deal with safety.
Manufacturers, distributors and retailers would need to think more carefully about (and document) safety assessments before putting products into circulation.
This is more efficient and safer than releasing products and then trying to recall them after problems start to be reported, hoping not too many consumers get harmed. It would also encourage businesses to “trade up” to the standards expected in many of our trading partners.
Choice has confirmed many Australians wrongly assume we already have a general safety provision.
It’s time to improve the law to avoid confusion and send better signals to suppliers.
It’s now beyond dispute that — for new electricity generation — solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy are cheaper than anything else: cheaper than new coal fired power stations, cheaper than new gas-fired stations and cheaper than new nuclear power plants.
The International Energy Association says so. Its latest World Energy Outlook describes solar as the cheapest electricity in history.
Solar costs 20% to 50% less than it thought it would two years ago.
Attention has turned instead to the ways to best meet demand when renewable resources are not available.
The government is a big supporter of gas, and as importantly, pumped hydro.
Pumped hydro is an old technology, as old as the electricity industry itself.
Pumped hydro is old technology
It became fashionable from the 1960s to 1980s as a complement to inflexible coal and nuclear generators.
When their output wasn’t needed (mainly at night) it was used to pump water to higher ground so that it could be released and used to run hydro generators when demand was high.
Australia’s three pumped hydro plants are old, built at least 40 years ago, and they operate infrequently, and sometimes not at all for years.
Gas fired electricity generation, whether by turbines (essentially a bigger version of those found on aeroplanes) or by conventional reciprocating engines, has several advantages over pumped hydro including much smaller local environmental impacts and in many cases smaller greenhouse gas impacts.
They can be built quickly and, most importantly, if there is a gas supply they can be built close to electrical loads. There are 17 gas-fired peaking generators in the National Electricity Market, but none have been built over the past decade.
Batteries are cheaper
Batteries have advantages over both.
In 2017, Australia built the world’s biggest battery, but it since been overtaken by a Californian battery more than twice its size and may soon be overtaken by one 150 times the size as part of the Sun Cable project in the Northern Territory which will send solar and stored electricity to Singapore.
Part of Tasmania’s proposed Battery of the Nation project.
The battery of the nation (BoTN) is a proposal instigated by the Australian and Tasmanian governments to add more pumped hydro to Tasmania’s hydro power system and used enhanced interconnectors to provide electricity on demand to Victoria.
We sought to determine what could most cost-effectively provide Victoria with 1,500 megawatts — the BoTN, gas turbines or batteries.
Partly this depends on how long peak demand for dispatchable power last. BoTN would be able to provide sustained power for 12 hours, but we found that in practice, even when our system becomes much more reliant on renewables, it would be unusual for anything longer than four hours to be needed.
Less than half the cost
We could easily dismiss gas turbines — the Australian Energy Market Operator’s costings have batteries much cheaper than gas turbines to build and operate now and cheaper still by the time the Battery of the Nation would be built.
And batteries are able to respond to instructions in fractions of a second, making them useful in ways gas and pumped hydro aren’t.
They are also able to be placed where they are needed, rather than where there’s a gas connection or an abandoned mine, cliff or hill big enough to be used for pumped hydro.
We found batteries could supply 1,500 megawatts of instantly-available power for less than half of the cost of the enhanced Tasmania to Victoria cable alone, meaning that even if the rest of the BoTN cost little, batteries would still be cheaper.
Pumped hydro projects are being pulled
Origin Energy recently gave up on expanding the Shoalhaven pumped hydro scheme in NSW after finding it would cost more than twice as much to build as first thought.
Similarly, investor-owned Genex has repeatedly deferred its final investment decision on one of the cheapest pumped hydro options in Australia — using depleted gold mine pits in Queensland — despite being offered concessional loans from the Australian Government to cover the entire build cost.
The final barrier seems to be obtaining subsidies from the Queensland Government to fund the necessary transmission lines.
Snowy 2.0 is proceeding, for now
Snowy 2.0 seems to be proceeding after the Australian Government pumped in $1.4 billion to get it going, and paid a king’s ransom to New South Wales and Victoria for their shares in Snowy Hydro.
Yet even before the main works are to start, credit rating agency S&P has down-graded Snowy Hydro’s stand-alone debt to “junk” and suggested the government will need to pump more money into Snowy Hydro to protect its debt.
Our analysis suggests neither gas nor pumped hydro can compete with batteries, and if the prime minister wants more of either, he will have to dip his hands deeply into tax payer’s pockets to get it.
The Morrison government has made its first appointments to the High Court. In doing so it has gone for continuity, both in terms of geography and gender.
The news Justices Jacqueline Gleeson and Simon Steward will be Australia’s next High Court judges follows months of speculation.
With the upcoming retirements of Justices Virginia Bell and Geoffrey Nettle — as they reach the constitutionally prescribed retirement age of 70 — two vacancies had opened up on the High Court bench.
Although it might be true that many Australians outside of the legal profession do not know who their judges are, as Bell observed in 2017, this lack of celebrity status certainly does not diminish the significance of these appointments.
Steward, 51, is from Melbourne and will join the court in December to replace Nettle (who is also a Victorian). He was appointed to the Federal Court in 2018, with speciality areas in tax and administrative law.
New High Court appointee, Jacqueline Gleeson.
Gleeson, 54, is from Sydney, and will join the court in March 2021 to replace Bell (who is also from NSW). She was appointed to the Federal Court in 2014, with Attorney-General Christian Porter noting her “diverse legal career at the bar and as a solicitor”.
As Porter also pointed out, Gleeson’s appointment represents a first in the common law world, as she is the daughter of former High Court Chief Justice, Murray Gleeson.
Announcing the news in Canberra on Wednesday, Porter said cabinet was “incredibly confident” Gleeson and Steward would,
make very useful additions to the High Court bench, they are outstanding judges, they have been outstanding barristers, they are outstanding members of the legal and broader Australian community.
Both names floated beforehand
These appointees were not entirely unexpected.
Both new judges names’ were floated as possible contenders. However, it is fair to say Steward’s name appeared more frequently, perhaps bolstered by his conservative credentials as a so called “black-letter” lawyer, who has a more literal interpretation of the law.
Gleeson is not a huge surprise either, given her wide-ranging background, with expertise in administrative law, competition and consumer law, professional liability and tax law.
The government has, as predicted gone for a like-for-like appointment both in terms of gender and state of origin. This means three out of the seven justices are women.
New High Court appointee, Simon Steward.
The assumption the new judges would be from NSW and Victoria gives us some insight into the significance of the state balance (and the taken-for-granted dominance of Sydney and Melbourne). This dominance has not been without debate. For example, the fact that no South Australian has ever been appointed to the court has been the subject of increasing criticism.
Until now, the gender dynamics on the High Court have been carefully crafted. No woman had ever replaced another woman — lest anyone get the idea there are seats reserved for women. Moreover, decision-makers have usually been insistent gender is not taken into account (while “merit” is).
Perhaps one surprise is that both new justices have been appointed from the Federal Court. It was assumed with Bell’s retirement at least one of the new judges would be an expert in criminal law (and be appointed from a state Supreme Court).
It means the High Court will be dominated by former Federal Court judges, with all justices other than Stephen Gageler elevated from the Federal Court.
What does this mean for the High Court?
None of this means appointment decisions are devoid of political dimensions — either about the specific composition of the court, or about a particular appointee’s views about the Commonwealth’s legislative power.
As constitutional law expert Professor Anne Twomey remarked in 2007:
A government may appoint a judge for a range of reasons, including adding some form of balance to the Court (state, sex or expertise in a particular area of law in which the Court is lacking) or because a judge is the leading jurist of their generation, or simply because a person is an uncontroversial compromise when views are polarised in relation to other candidates.
Inevitably, questions will be raised about what kind of judges the new appointees will be.
The appointment of the sixth woman (and the 49th man) suggests some inroads have been made to ensuring the court reflects the society from which it is drawn. But more can be done.
Yet, with no formal recognition of the importance of diversity in appointments, or any transparency in terms of the process of appointment, any progress remains at the whim of the government of the day.
For Gleeson and Steward, their appointments represent a significant personal achievement. What impact they will have on the High Court remains to be seen, but there is no doubt they have the capacity to shape the court’s decisions into the future.
Given their respective ages, they will certainly have time to make their mark.
It’s January 20th, 2021. Inauguration day. A triumphant Joe Biden salutes the National Mall crowd (way bigger than the last guy’s) and dedicates his victory to Sacha Baron Cohen, aka Borat, the satirical mastermind who delivered the knock-out blow to Trumpism.
Released on Amazon Prime Video in the shadow of the looming U.S. election, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is a wet firecracker of an October Surprise.
Cohen reprises his role of the smiley, Jew-hating journalist from Kazakhstan, a real country no American ever seems to have heard of. His latest mission: bribe someone close to Trump with the gift of his 15-year-old daughter (played by brilliant newcomer Maria Bakalova).
Sacha Baron Cohen and Maria Bakalova in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020)Amazon Studios, Four by Two Films
Most hopes are pinned on a compromising scene involving Rudy Giuliani and Bakalova, with the former posing as a giggly reporter whose interview transitions into a bedside fondle.
It is undeniably disturbing to watch Giuliani get handsy with both Bakalova’s backside and his own crum. However it’s hard to believe that those mythical undecided voters will give a hoot. Like his boss, Giulani has simply denied everything and moved on.
Otherwise, the closest the movie gets to laying a glove on anyone currently in power comes during a scene shot at the Conservative Political Action Conference last February.
Dressed in a “McDonald Trump” fat suit, Cohen/Borat huffs towards the stage where Mike Pence is giving a speech, only to be quickly and efficiently ejected. Frankly, the fly did more damage.
There’s plenty of satire of the kicking down variety, and the film is successful at getting everyday Americans to either voice or condone horrific prejudice on camera. These cringy interactions lit up the first (and still pretty funny!) Borat made in 2006.
But conservatism was more civil back then. Its face was the daftly likable George W. Bush, whose let’s-grab-a-beer appeal masked the atrocities of his administration.
It was therefore genuinely chilling to watch Cohen lift the log on that era’s patriotic rah-rah and reveal the squirming xenophobia underneath. The movie mostly lives on through its catchphrases — MAH WIFE, VERY NICE, WAWAWEEWA – but it was pointed and prophetic satire.
We’ve got reality TV
That was then, however, and this is now. It’s 2020 and we’ve had reality TV for decades: are we really shocked by scenes of a baker happily piping an antisemitic message onto a birthday cake, or by a hardware salesman high-fiving about Mexicans in cages?
Cohen is clearly a deadpan master at getting people to expose themselves, but that tactic is ineffective when people are already being rewarded for shouting their worst impulses into a bullhorn. Those disgusting frat boys from the first film? They’re probably Congressmen by now.
There are plenty of reasons to want Trump out, and one is it might just make satire great again. Conservative internet warriors like to joke about TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome), an ailment that leaves opponents of the president convulsing at the sight of a Cheeto. It’s mostly internet banter, but when it comes to satire, there’s a kernel of truth to it.
A enormous black (orange?) hole
These past four years, the Donald has been an enormous black (orange?) hole sucking up all the satiric energy with his shamelessness. Has this endless barrage produced any effect at all? Maybe. But it’s certainly been responsible for some forgettable art.
You can’t blame the satirists for trying. Trump is a plump blimp of a target, and it always feels like he’s one clever joke away from going full Hindenburg. The fact that he’s still afloat has led to manydeclaringsatire’sdeath.
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm won’t be the Jeff Bezos-backed David that slays Goliath. The film does manage to skewer some targets beyond the White House, though. Case in point: the creepy misogyny Bakalova’s naïve waif elicits everywhere she goes.
Whereas most of the “gotcha” comedy and rehashed #TheResistence jokes fall flat, we almost vomited during a scene in which an elderly plastic surgeon tells Bakalova he would love to “sex attack” her. Elsewhere, a Georgian gentleman coolly appraises her at a debutante ball before deciding she’s worth $500.
These scenes rekindle the laugh-then-wince energy that fuelled the first Borat film. If the new movie lasts beyond the current electoral vortex, it may be the feminist satire that carries it. It’s also a reminder that the country won’t suddenly become paradise in a Biden/Harris world. Removing one pussy-grabber does not a summer make.
When satirists as talented as Cohen feel they can move on from Trump, some fresh wind will hopefully blow through the genre. The gotcha trope has been a stale for four years, but satire isn’t dead yet. It might even win Texas.
The United Liberation Movement if West Papua (ULMWP) has accused the Indonesian government of imposing martial law on the Melanesian region of West Papua and brutally supressing protests in a crackdown.
“Students have been shot with live rounds, tear gassed and beaten with bamboo sticks by police in Jayapura – just for staging a peaceful sit-in. How can people be shot and beaten for sitting in a public space?” said ULMWP chair Benny Wenda.
RNZ Pacific reports that the university students were forced to flee from the gunshots as the police dispersed the protesters yesterday.
The students were demonstrating against the government’s plans for a new Special Autonomy law in Papua region when members of both police and military forces came to disperse them.
Footage from Jayapura shows armed security forces personnel pursuing students through their dormitory precinct in Waena sub-district, accompanied by the sound of gunfire.
At least one student was wounded and has reportedly been taken to hospital.
A police spokesman has denied that the students were isolated in their dormitories, saying the demonstrators were disrupting public order.
Public gatherings not allowed He said that during the covid-19 pandemic mass public gatherings were not allowed.
According to the Papua Legal Aid Institute, 13 people involved in the demonstration were arrested.
Armed police were “stalking every corner of West Papua”, and troops awere forcing thousands of people from their homes across huge swathes of our land, the ULMWP’s website said today.
“This is martial law in all but name,” said Wenda.
Urban military checkoints “You cannot walk through an urban centre in West Papua today without being stopped by police, without meeting a military checkpoint.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thea van de Mortel, Professor, Nursing and Deputy Head (Learning & Teaching), School of Nursing and Midwifery, Griffith University
In some Australian states, kids have been back on slides, swings and monkey bars for months. But in Victoria, many families are only now getting back to playgrounds, after they were closed for much of the second lockdown.
With lots of kids running around, and parents looking on, how can you ensure your trip to the playground is COVID-safe for you, your children and others?
A good place to start is to understand how COVID-19 spreads, and what you can do to interrupt it.
Droplets big and small
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the main way SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) spreads is by droplet transmission.
Droplets containing virus particles are released from the mouth or nose when someone who is infectious coughs, sneezes, laughs, talks or even breathes. The more vigorous the activity, the greater the volume of droplets and spread (so, for example, laughing releases more droplets than breathing).
Larger droplets fall to the ground relatively quickly and within a short distance of where they were released. But you can inhale them if you’re standing close to an infected person.
Smaller droplets, or aerosols, can travel further and hang around for longer in the air. Scientists are still working to understand the importance of this form of transmission — commonly termed airborne transmission — in the spread of COVID-19.
COVID-19 meant playgrounds were closed for a while.Shutterstock
Another possible route of transmission is contact with contaminated surfaces. This happens when infectious droplets fall onto surfaces, or contaminated hands touch surfaces. If an uninfected person touches the contaminated surface and then touches their face or food, they may ingest virus particles and become infected.
A recent laboratory study found SARS-CoV-2 particles can remain both detectable and viable (able to cause infection) on surfaces for many days, particularly if the surfaces are smooth, such as metal or plastic. As with airborne transmission, scientists are still figuring out how common this mode of transmission is for COVID-19.
The good news about playgrounds is they’re generally outdoors in parks. The risk of inhaling infectious droplets is reduced because the large volume of air has a dilution effect, compared with being in a confined space indoors with other people. Outdoor breezes can also disperse particles.
The temperature also appears to influence the risk. Warmer temperatures have been shown to reduce the viability of SARS-CoV-2 more quickly than cooler temperatures, while sunlight may also help inactivate the virus. In Australia, of course, we’re now heading into the warmer and sunnier summer period.
On the other side of the coin, public playground equipment may not be cleaned regularly. So there could be some risk of transmission via contaminated surfaces.
And while warmer weather and particularly being outdoors may protect us to a degree, as with anything during the pandemic, a small level of risk remains.
Check the restrictions and requirements in your state around mask wearing, how far you can travel, and the number of people permitted in a space before heading to a playground.
Don’t go to the playground if you or your child is sick or has any COVID-19 symptoms (fever, cough, sniffles, upset tummy).
Keep your distance (at least 1.5 metres) from anyone not in your household. While it’s tempting to socialise with other parents, avoid congregating closely with others.
Take disinfectant wipes or wet wipes with you and wipe down areas little hands frequently touch (such as swing chains) before your kids use the equipment, particularly if they’re too young to understand instructions.
Take hand sanitiser with you (minimum 60% alcohol). Ensure your children sanitise their hands before getting on the equipment, after playing, before eating and before leaving the playground. Supervise young children when they use alcohol-based hand sanitiser. Parents should regularly sanitise too.
Avoid using shared taps or water fountains; instead, bring bottled drinks. Frequently touched surfaces such as taps are more likely to be contaminated.
Remind children to avoid touching their face while using the play equipment.
Avoid physical contact between your kids and other kids in the area.
Avoid sharing toys with other children. If you bring toys, make sure they’re washable.
Use the playground outside of peak use periods to reduce the amount of contact with others.
If possible, it’s good to visit the playground at a time it might be quieter.Shutterstock
While younger children may not understand or follow instructions well about keeping away from other children or touching their face, fortunately, they appear to have a lower risk of being diagnosed with COVID-19, and of developing severe disease if they are infected.
The focus with young children should be on frequent hand hygiene and preventing physical contact with non-family members as much as possible.
With little COVID-19 transmission in Australia now, and most playgrounds being outdoors, a trip to the playground is fairly low-risk, and we know physical activity carries many benefits for children and adults alike. But we can all do our part to minimise any risk of transmission.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of deceased people.
The Northern Territory court decision this week to commit Police Constable Zachary Rolfe to stand trial for the shooting death of 19-year-old Warlpiri man Kumanjayi Walker marks a historic moment in accountability for First Nations deaths in custody.
It is the first time a police officer will face a murder trial in a First Nations death in custody case in the Northern Territory in modern history.
The decision was handed down months after another policeman was charged with murder in the shooting death of an Indigenous woman in Western Australia. He has pleaded not guilty and is expected to face trial next year.
The cases are moving ahead amid a global reckoning on police and prison violence as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has focused new attention on First Nations families fighting for justice for the deaths of their loved ones.
Late on the evening of November 9 2019, five police officers entered Walker’s family home in Yuendumu, central Australia, to try to arrest him. This set in motion the events that led to Rolfe firing the three shots that killed the teenager.
Murder charges were laid against Rolfe days later, and bail was granted the same day.
Kumanjayi Walker.PR handout
The NT Criminal Lawyers Association described the granting of bail over the phone for a serious homicide as “very unusual in the extreme”. It also raised concerns among Yuendumu elders that justice was being compromised in Walker’s death.
The freedom that Rolfe enjoys on bail contrasts with the high remand rates for First Nations people (85%) in the NT.
Rolfe has also been stood down from the police force while on bail, but is still receiving pay.
Sufficient evidence to stand trial
Before a trial for a serious crime can proceed to the NT Supreme Court, the local court must determine whether the prosecution’s evidence is “sufficient to put the defendant on trial”. This occurs through a committal hearing.
Rolfe’s three-day committal occurred in early September in Alice Springs. His lawyer made a “no-case submission” that the charges be dropped on the grounds of self-defence.
Relatives of Kumanjayi Walker outside Alice Springs Local Court in December.CHLOE/AAP
This week, the presiding local court judge, John Birch, determined there was sufficient evidence for Rolfe to stand trial.
Birch indicated the case will proceed in Alice Springs next year unless an application is accepted by the court to move the trial to Darwin.
434 deaths in custody since 1991
There have been at least 434 First Nations deaths in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody handed down its final report in 1991.
The commission followed years of community outrage and protests over mounting Aboriginal deaths in custody. It put forward 339 recommendations that called for the use of arrest and imprisonment as a last resort, safer police and prison practices, independent investigations into deaths in custody and Aboriginal self-determination.
Yet, First Nations deaths in custody have continued in violent, reckless and negligent circumstances, reflecting the failure of governments to implement and enforce the recommendations.
Gomeroi scholar Alison Whittaker has argued colonial violence in custody has been institutionalised through the lack of accountability in First Nations death in custody cases.
This lack of accountability is pronounced in the NT, where deaths in custody and police violence rarely proceed to charges or prosecutions.
The 2002 killing of 18-year-old Robert Jongmin by Senior Constable Robert Whittington resulted in murder, then manslaughter, charges being brought against the officer, which were eventually dropped.
The constable was then charged with the downgraded offence of “dangerous act causing death”, which was quashed by the NT Supreme Court on statutory grounds in 2006.
Trials against police in other states
Outside the NT, two well-publicised manslaughter trials in First Nations deaths in custody cases have resulted in not guilty verdicts.
The first was in the trial of four police officers and a police aide for the the death of 16-year-old Yindjibarndi man John Pat in Rosebourne police lock-up (Western Australia) in 1983. The second was Senior Constable Chris Hurley for the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee in Palm Island watch house (Queensland) in 2004.
Tracey Twaddle (left), Doomadgee’s partner, reacting to the not guilty verdict passed down at the Townsville Supreme Court in 2007.DAVE HUNT/AAP
The empanelment of all-white juries to try the officers in both cases has been questioned by justice advocates. The Royal Commission asked in 1991 in relation to Pat’s death,
How does it come about in the Pilbara that a very important trial was conducted before a jury without Aboriginal representation, given the number of Aboriginal people in that region?
Another perceived factor behind the not guilty outcome in the Doomadgee case was the campaign run by the Queensland Police Union in support of Hurley. The defence of Hurley and his characterisation as a victim — demonstrated at police rallies and on wrist bands — received widespread media attention.
Queensland police vote to march on state parliament in response to a decision to charge Hurley in Doomadgee’s death.Dave Hunt/AAP
From the outset, Warlpiri people in Yuendumu have been strident in their demands for justice for Walker and protections from ongoing police violence. They have also called for police there to be disarmed.
Yuendumu Elder Harry Jakamarra Nelson deplored the recent $7 million spent on the local police station. He also implicated the lasting effects of the Northern Territory Intervention in the oppression of First Nations people by taking power out of the hands of locals.
This policy has contributed to the mass imprisonment of Indigenous people in the NT — described by many as a “gulag” — and the allegations of systemic racism in NT police practices.
Yuendumu community members, nonetheless, recognise they have made history as a result of the murder trial.
Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves, a senior Warlpiri man and chairperson of the Warlpiri Parumpurru [Justice] Committee, said the case provides the community with “relief”.
Meanwhile, other families continue their fight for justice. This week, the NSW coroner is hearing arguments about whether a corrective services officer who shot and killed Wiradjuri man Dwayne Johnstone as he tried to escape should be referred for prosecution. Like Walker, Johnstone was killed by an officer who fired three shots at him.
A coronial inquiry is also investigating the death of Anaiwan man Nathan Reynolds from an untreated asthma attack at a Sydney prison in 2018.
And the NSW Parliament has commenced hearings in an inquiry into the high rate of Aboriginal incarceration.
Walker’s cousin, Samara Fernandez, raised concerns earlier this year about the unequal application of the law and the lack of procedural fairness for First Nations people. She said,
You’d think it’s common sense to have a system that works equally for all populations … we want the system to be reinvented in a way that doesn’t have those stereotypes towards our people.
The dignity of procedural fairness and impartiality is the minimum First Nations families should expect when their loved one is taken by the law enforcement system.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jo Caust, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow (Hon), School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne
There was a time when artists imagined and planned work for 2020. For some, years had gone into the planning. But, as we know, everything scheduled from the middle of March had to be cancelled. Some events may be scheduled again at another time; many will no longer happen.
A group of artists have put together a map of the abandoned artistic projects for 2020. Conceived by artist Anna Tregloan and named The Impossible Project, it is a treasury of lost work and a time capsule of what we missed out on this year due to the pandemic.
There are already over 150 shows and events listed. More projects are being added all the time.
The Impossible Project captures the enormous range of work by Australian artists that could have happened in every Australian city, in regional areas and overseas.
We see the breadth and depth of artistic activity across the country; the loss for audiences, artists, and communities. Select a title, and you see the artists involved, the venue, the dates, the expected audience numbers.
It is a sobering experience.
An imagined map lists more than 100 cancelled and postponed works.The Impossible Project
Those that will never be…
There is a re-imagined production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (projected audience: 5,000+), to be directed by Australian theatremaker Anne-Lousie Sarks in Basel, Switzerland. In planning since 2018, involving performers from countries across the world, the play was cancelled five days before its March premiere.
Patricia Cornelius’s Do Not Go Gentle… (projected audience: 8,000) was to be directed by Susie Dee in July at the Malthouse in Melbourne.
The play focuses on the experience of people in an aged care home; Shane Bourne was cast in the lead role. Given the experience of this year, the setting could not be more relevant. The play was presented in one sell-out season in 2009 – this 2020 production was more than 10 years in the making.
River Crossing (projected audience: 4,000) was to be a large-scale outdoor performance, where First Nations’ performer Con Colleano – an internationally famous tightrope walker – would cross the Wilson River in Lismore on a high-wire in August. SeedArts Australia has been planning the project since 2018.
Planning for River Crossing took years. The structure remains only sketches.SeedArts
The all-female Belloo Creative was the resident theatre company at Queensland Theatre for 2019-20. To premiere in 2020, Katherine Lyall-Watson wrote a re-imagined Phaedra (projected audience: 7,140). The play was set in the future, with war taking place between a seceded Queensland and the rest of the country – another strangely pertinent theme.
Matt Whittet’s new play Kindness (projected audience: 3,500) was to be directed by Lee Lewis at the Griffin Theatre. This loss feels particularly poignant, as the play looked at the experiences of community kindness – kindness we have all witnessed in 2020.
Whittet says he hopes it is only on hold:
Nothing is certain in the world at the moment, which means there’s no promises but always hope.
… and those that found a new life
The Impossible Project also finds silver linings.
Sydney performance and visual artist Rakini Devi had planned a project with Melbourne video artist Karl Ockelford. With border closures, they were unable to work together.
Instead, Devi developed a solo project examining the position of women from the Indian diaspora who experience violence, being “lockdowned” and various forms of misogyny.
Melbourne musical theatre company Watch This specialises in the work of Stephen Sondheim. It had planned an exhibition of design and creative work for shows spanning seven years of the company’s productions.
Scheduled to start in March at Northcote Town Hall, the exhibition was cancelled six days before opening. But the company was able to re-mount it as a digital documentary series, The Art of Making Art. Through this, Watch This has been able to expand its audience, with the series selected for Canada’s Social Distancing Festival.
Further loss
The Impossible Project documents shows that were meant to appear at the Sydney Opera House, Griffin Theatre, the Riverside Theatre and the Ensemble in Sydney; at Malthouse, the Recital Centre, the Arts Centre and Arts House in Melbourne; at La Boite, QPAC and Queensland Theatre in Brisbane.
There are touring shows scheduled for cities and regional centres. There are festivals – all now cancelled.
We have lost the audiences who haven’t been able to see work in a live venue; the time artists spent developing a new work, only to see it cancelled with no commitment to return; we will, inevitably, lose artists who will give up on the increasingly precarious dream of a creative life.
Kindness was programmed at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre – its season was cancelled.Brett Boardman
When we talk about the impact of this year on the arts sector, we often focus on the economic losses. In April, the Grattan Institute estimated up to 75% of people employed in the creative and performing arts could lose their jobs. By May, I Lost My Gig had recorded the loss of income for Australian artists of more than A$340 million.
Shows began being cancelled in March. The Federal Government didn’t announce a support package until June. Last week it was revealed none of the $250 million package has been allocated (bar $48 million allowing Screen Australia to underwrite the insurance of films in production, which does not represent money spent).
It is a mystery why the government does not take the cultural sector seriously, or value the arts, or see how it contributes to our society.
We are seeing the arts and humanities removed from our universities, artists left out in the cold during this terrible time, and no indication of a way forward.
This is a loss to Australia on a grand scale. The list of cancelled work in The Impossible Project is not one we want to see continue — but it is inevitable the list will grow.
It was cold, mid-winter in Canberra, when I returned to the National Archives in mid-2019 searching for more documents, scouring through the accession records for Sir John Kerr’s papers, where, I told myself, even the most obscure files might turn up something important, something I had never imagined.
And then, quite suddenly, one of them did.
As I waited for the High Court to consider my application for special leave, a file containing letters between Kerr and the queen’s private secretary after Kerr had left office landed in my inbox.
I had requested this file, with the arresting title “Buckingham Palace”, eight years earlier, after which it had disappeared into the archival limbo of “withheld pending advice”.
It suddenly reappeared in a “decision on access” email, with no explanation for the eight-year delay, with its cache of letters providing a jaw-dropping account of royal intervention in Kerr’s autobiography, Matters for Judgment, which was soon to be released.
The crowd outside Parliament House on November 11 1975.Museum of Australian Democracy
The supportive exchanges between Kerr, Prince Charles and the queen and [her private secretary, Sir Martin] Charteris, which had been so welcome before the dismissal, soon became a major concern for the palace, which feared losing control of both the increasingly erratic Kerr and their letters.
As the outcry over the dismissal showed no sign of abating even a year later, including demonstrations and angry placards, and paint thrown at the vice-regal Rolls-Royce, pressure was building on Kerr to resign.
Under siege, he began to agitate for the release of the palace letters, which he felt would bolster support for his actions. This began with careless comments about the letters and “the attitude of the Palace” at the time of the dismissal to friends and colleagues.
The Palace Letters.
Word of Kerr’s indiscretion, his boasting of the queen’s approval of “the way that I am going about things”, soon reached the palace itself, to great alarm. It grew to a crescendo soon after Kerr’s resignation as governor-general took effect in December 1977, with his visit to the queen’s new private secretary, Sir Philip Moore, to plead his case for the release of the letters.
Kerr was intent on using the letters to garner support for his action in dismissing Whitlam if he possibly could – and what better place to do it than in his autobiography, which he was finalising in self-imposed exile in England? His book was being eagerly, and in some quarters nervously, awaited, since Kerr was loudly proclaiming that he would now report “the facts of the happenings of 1975 […] in the interests of truth”.
With publication looming, and with it the prospect that Kerr might reveal their secret discussions, the queen’s private secretary contacted Kerr directly and asked for a copy of his draft manuscript.
“Buckingham Palace has evinced an interest in the manuscript and all parts of it which touch directly upon the Queen’s position and the Palace’s position will need to be thought about,” Kerr wrote to his lawyers in Sydney. Kerr dutifully sent his manuscript to the queen’s private secretary, and it was soon “in safe keeping now at Buckingham Palace”.
Sir John Kerr agitated for the release of the palace letters.National Archives of Australia/AAP
“It will make fascinating reading,” Moore assured him, “I will get into [sic] touch with you again as soon as I have finished it.”
Moore’s brief comment on the book arrived three weeks later, and if you thought the historical dissembling about the dismissal must eventually reach a natural end, think again.
The queen’s private secretary thanked Kerr for excising any references to his discussions with Charteris about “the controversy”:
I am grateful to you for being so scrupulous in omitting any reference to the informal exchanges which you had with Martin Charteris. I know that you have throughout been anxious to keep The Queen out of the controversy and I much appreciate the way in which you have achieved this in the book.
Which shows Kerr to be as unreliable in print as he was in office.
Kerr could scarcely hide his delight at this royal approbation of his expurgated history:
I did my very best of course to omit any reference to the exchanges between Martin Charteris and myself. It is particularly gratifying to me to know that the result is satisfactory.
These letters not only confirm Kerr was in contact with Charteris regarding the dismissal, but they also reveal that the palace and Kerr then agreed to keep these “exchanges” hidden by omitting any mention of them in Kerr’s “autobiography”.
Matters for Judgment duly contained no mention of his “informal exchanges” with Charteris, nor any details of Charteris’s “illuminating observations” and “advice to me on dismissal” that Kerr had noted in his journal.
Despite Kerr’s claims his book would present “the truth” and “facts” about the events of November 1975, it was a tawdry exercise in historical distortion by omission – a royal whitewash of history.
Most shocking in this latest revelation of ongoing royal intrigue was the clear example it provided of the mechanism through which the secrecy that drove the dismissal – the collusion of Kerr with others, and his deception of the prime minister – continued in the construction of its history. It shows the involvement of the palace in the construction of a flawed and filtered history about one of the most contentious episodes in Australia’s history.
It was a shameful episode in that shared history, the details of which were still emerging.
Children from disadvantaged backgrounds, very remote areas, and Indigenous Australians are up to two times more likely to start school developmentally vulnerable than the national average.
In 2018, 21.7% of Australian five year olds (70,308 children) were not developmentally ready when they started school. And in Year 7, nearly 25% of students (72,419) didn’t have the required numeracy and literacy skills.
The statement aims for a quality education system for all young people, that supports them to be creative and confident individuals, successful learners and active and informed members of the community.
But our report finds students’ location and family circumstances continue to play a strong role in determining outcomes from school entry to adulthood.
While this crisis in educational inequality isn’t new, it’s likely to get a lot worse, as COVID-19 increases levels of student vulnerability and remote learning widens gaps in achievement.
Disadvantaged children missing out as school progresses
The Alice Springs declaration sets two ambitious goals:
the Australian education system promotes excellence and equity. In part, this is about ensuring all young Australians have access to high-quality education, inclusive and free from any form of discrimination
all young Australians become confident and creative individuals, successful lifelong learners, and active and informed members of the community. This includes all children having a sense of self-worth, self-awareness and personal identity that enables them to manage their emotional, mental, cultural, spiritual and physical well-being.
The declaration was signed last year, and builds on previous ones signed in Hobart, Adelaide and Melbourne over three decades. It recognises the role education plays in preparing young people to contribute meaningfully to social, economic and cultural life.
Our report uses the best available data to paint a comprehensive picture of Australia’s performance against the above important goals.
It shows the gap in academic learning as well as other key areas, such as creativity and confidence, is clear from school entry and usually grows over time.
Analysis in our report tracked students’ learning from when they started school in 2009 to when they were in Year 5 in 2014. It showed that in literacy and numeracy for instance, the gap between the proportion of children from the most disadvantaged and advantaged families meeting relevant standards grew from 20.6 percentage points at school entry to 27.2 percentage points in Year 5.
The report also shows too many students in the senior years of school are not developing key skills. In 2018, 27.8% of 15 year olds (88,314) didn’t meet or exceed the international benchmark standards in maths, reading and science.
While some students receive the support they need to catch up to their peers, many don’t.
A lot of young people are also not developing the qualities needed to confidently adapt to challenges in adulthood and contribute to their communities.
The report shows that in 2017, 28.1% (110,410) of 23 year olds were not confident in themselves or the future and 29.9% were not adaptable to change and open to new ideas. It shows 38.1% (145,056) of 23 year olds were not actively engaged in their community and 33.2% were not keeping informed about current affairs.
Additionally, many young Australians are not being well prepared and supported to find and secure meaningful employment. Overall, according to the 2016 census, nearly 30% of 24 year olds (112,695) weren’t in full-time education, training or work.
Around half of all 24 year old Indigenous Australians, and one in three of the most disadvantaged Australians, were not engaged in any work or education, compared to 15% nationally.
This failure to address educational inequality reproduces and amplifies existing poverty across generations. It saps productivity, undermines social cohesion and costs governments and communities billions of dollars.
There are no quick ways to fix educational inequality, but there are several key improvements that will make a difference.
Closing gaps in participation and lifting the quality of early childhood education services — particularly in disadvantaged communities where services tend to be lower quality — should be one of our highest priorities. Early childhood education is critical to giving every child the best possible start. Evidence shows preschool raises children’s chances of being developmentally ready for school in key areas by around 12 percentage points.
Despite efforts through the Gonski reforms, there is still significant room to improve how Australia targets funding and support to schools with the highest level of need. We need to address the imbalance in resources between advantaged and disadvantaged Australian schools, which is the worst in the OECD.
This is not just about money, but building strong leadership and teaching capability in every school. High quality teaching is proven to be critical to improving student outcomes. We also need to support high quality use of data and assessment to tailor teaching to students’ needs, provide feedback and measure progress.
Government projections show 90% of employment growth in the next four years will require education beyond school. This means we must prepare young people for an economy requiring higher levels of skill than ever. We need to rethink existing models of tertiary education to make it accessible to all students.
Addressing educational inequality is as much about what happens outside the classroom as inside. Nurturing every child’s development and well-being is best achieved through a partnership between schools, families, communities and other support services.
Australia cannot afford education systems that fail so many students. That’s not just in economic terms – because the cost of lost opportunity is even greater down the track – but also in human terms. We know the social and health costs of disengaging in education are significant.
On October 31, Queensland will become Australia’s first state to go to the polls during the pandemic.
Normally, state elections pass amiably. They matter to the MPs, ministers and senior public servants concerned. But aside from what the tea leaves might imply for national electoral politics, they cast few ripples.
This year is different. State governments matter now, in ways they have not for decades.
Expect a Labor victory
This does not mean the Queensland election will produce any shocks. On the contrary. The pandemic has been good for incumbents.
Leaders, Australia-wide, are enjoying high approval ratings during the pandemic. During the tumult of the first wave, a Liberal National Brisbane City Council was returned with not a single ward changing hands.
The Palaszczuk government will, I bet, be similarly returned. Whether it deserves to, after five quiet years and given a challenging economic climate, is another matter. But it has one trump card: north of the Tweed, barely one person in a million has died of COVID-19.
This puts Queensland in a select group of democratic jurisdictions of any significant size. Only Taiwan and East Timor have done better on that metric, and they are more communal and less individualistic than Queenslanders.
There has been a fundamental shift
Why then is 2020 different? In all the focus on statistics — health, economic and electoral — we’ve paid little attention to a fundamental shift. State governments, long relegated to second or third order by our escalating focus on international and national politics, have soared back to prominence.
States have important powers and have had to use them during the pandemic.
This reminds us that we live within a federal system of government, and this affects our daily lives. Not just in the lofty and indirect sense — how the Commonwealth carves up GST amongst the states, for example — but in an everyday sense.
The cause of all this should be obvious. States have what constitutional lawyers call the “policing power”. Not only can they police individuals under criminal law, they can also make movement and gathering orders.
States also have the power to license (or limit) businesses and other organised activities. In the pandemic, those powers have been front and centre of the public health response.
Previously, we had come to see state borders as fusty lines from colonial times. Yet right now, the sorest issue in Australian politics involves those lines being taken seriously.
The High Court, at the behest of Clive Palmer, may yet unwind such controls. But it will be years before we return to conceiving of state borders as merely lines on a map.
More than just service providers
Pre-COVID, states had come to be seen as mere service providers, akin to local government in the UK with their local health boards and educational authorities.
Constitutional lawyers have a term for this — “vertical fiscal imbalance”. The federal government collects about 80% of tax revenue, so it can play puppeteer, in everything from education to roads.
It is not that money is unimportant in the pandemic. Indeed, money has reinforced the Commonwealth government’s focus on macroeconomics and social security during COVID-19. Meanwhile, its other great leitmotif is national security.
So, we came to see the states as service deliverers and the federal government as holding the purse strings and looking after defence. This is even reflected in a more “blokey” politics at national level and a more nurturing one at state level, where female leaders are much more common.
Since a post-industrial Labor Party emerged 40 years ago, Labor has held office almost 60% of the time at state and territory level. Whereas the conservative Coalition has held office 56% of the time at national level.
States have traditionally been viewed as the service deliverers, with the federal government holding most of the money.Mark McCormack/AAP
However, the “social-democratic states”/“conservative nation” contrast can be taken too far. Palaszczuk has positioned herself as a resolute Border Queen. This invokes the ghosts of parochial predecessors, like Peter Beattie and Joh Bjelke-Petersen, as much as it appeals to the trope of the mother figure, worrying about her constituents’ health.
The states are back
In short, the states are back at the forefront. While this may wane as we transcend the pandemic, it will also recur as other natural disasters become more common, thanks to global warming.
States and their leaders have taken centre stage during COVID-19.Mark McCormack/AAP
Alongside the rebound in the role of the states, national attention has also fallen on the style of leadership that is more common at state level.
Palaszczuk, like her NSW counterpart Gladys Berejiklian, is ideologically centrist but presents a velvet glove over an iron fist.
That style may yet infuse national politics. That will depend on whether a communal spirit, of pulling together, survives from the pandemic to counterbalance interest group warfare.
Meanwhile, Queensland is about to decide whether to endorse Palaszczuk’s leadership, or embrace a different one.
We will remember 2020 as a year of crisis. COVID-19 hit Australia just as we were beginning to make sense of the horror bushfires and smoke of last summer, a sinister illustration of global warming’s threats.
Since then, the news media has given centre stage to COVID-19 and its cascading impacts on society, shifting climate change to a relatively minor role in our narrative of this year’s crises. So, have Australians forgotten about the urgency of climate change?
No. Polling released today by The Australia Institute shows climate change and its impacts remain a prominent concern to Australians, even amid the upheaval and uncertainty wrought by COVID-19.
The majority of Australians (57%) experienced some form of direct impact from last summer’s bushfires or smoke.Shutterstock
82% of Aussies worry about climate-driven bushfires
This year, it polled 1,998 Australians aged 18 and over, and found the vast majority (79%) hold views in line with the best available scientific evidence. That is, four in five Australians agree climate change is occurring. This is the highest result since 2012.
An even greater majority, 82%, is worried climate change will result in more bushfires, up from 76% in last year’s report. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the record-breaking fires of last summer and the threat of longer and more ferocious fire seasons.
The bushfire royal commission is due to release its report today, and will likely highlight climate change as an amplifier of bushfire risk. This was foreshadowed in the commission’s interim observations in August.
The report also showed Australians believe the post-pandemic economic recovery is not a time to further entrench fossil fuels. Only 12% of Australians want to see Australia’s economic recovery led by investment in gas, a plan the Morrison government is set on carrying out.
The level of scientific consensus on climate change is remarkable. Urgent action on climate change is recommended by scientists and desired by the overwhelming majority of the public. Yet, Australia remains an international laggard in this area.
The Climate Change Performance Index evaluates 57 countries plus the European Union, which together are responsible for more than 90% of global emissions. This year, Australia ranked last on climate policy.
Australia’s inaction on climate change has made the country an international laggard.AAP Image/Lukas Coch
For many years, denial, delay and division over climate change was the norm in Australian politics. This is still the case among some media and political elites, and is no more pronounced than in debates over the future of coal in the domestic energy mix and for export.
Our energy sources play a big role in our overall contribution to climate change, with electricity generation contributing 32.7% of Australia’s emissions.
For everyday Australians, the solution is clear. The Climate of the Nation report shows the vast majority (83%) want to see coal-fired power stations phased out. Some 65% want the Australian government to stop new coal mines from being developed.
Toxic politics limit constructive conversations
For many, particularly those living in Australia’s coal production regions, the prospect of shifting from coal to renewables raises legitimate concerns about their futures.
However, the ability for people and policy to engage constructively with concerns over jobs and climate is limited by toxic politics.
An important culprit is the pervasive “us versus them” narrative that dominates political and media discourse. The narrative repeatedly – but erroneously – signals to people in coal production regions that the rest of the country doesn’t care about them.
Coal production is also pitted against climate action in the “climate versus jobs” debate. But the polling shows such binaries are false: most Australians do care what happens in coal production regions. In fact, three-quarters of Australians want governments to plans and manage an orderly shift from coal to renewables.
The Australian people, by a large majority, care for those living in coal production communities and want to secure a safe climate.
68% of Aussies support an ambitious climate target
Australians recognise our country can make a disproportionately large and positive contribution to international efforts to mitigate climate change.
Most Australians want to see a renewables-led economic recovery from COVID-19.AAP Image/Dean Lewins
Seventy-one percent want Australia to be a global leader in finding solutions to climate change, while 77% recognise tackling climate change can create opportunities for new jobs and investment in clean energy.
While all Australian states and territories have committed to net-zero emissions by 2050 or sooner, the federal government has not. But, once again, a majority of people would like to see otherwise: 68% support a net-zero by 2050 target for Australia. This is four percentage points higher than last year.
The Climate of the Nation results clearly shows this goes against the will of the Australian people. Australia has a voting base that will support and reward ambitious climate action. Now is the time for political leaders to reflect this in the nation’s climate policy.
An overarching criticism of the recent federal budget is that it overlooked the workers hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic, namely women. However, the budget includes one promising, albeit small, initiative that focuses on this group. The government announced a cadetship program to help women to upskill in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), or to build a STEM career.
As part of the JobMaker scheme, the budget allocates A$25 million over five years to create pathways to STEM careers for up to 500 women through industry-sponsored, advanced apprenticeship-style courses. Collaborations between employers and VET providers and/or universities will deliver these “sandwiched programs” combining study and work. Women will be able to get career experience and a salary while obtaining an industry-relevant, advanced diploma in a STEM field.
This scheme should help increase female participation in STEM-related learning and careers. Because more women than men enrol in higher-level VET qualifications – diplomas or advanced diplomas – it’s expected to be attractive to them.
Why is the gender gap in STEM such a problem?
To be competitive in a world increasingly driven and underpinned by technology, Australia must invest in STEM skills to meet evolving industry workforce needs. STEM jobs are growing nearly twice as fast as non-STEM jobs and the trend is set to continue.
It’s notable that people in STEM occupations hold more qualifications than those in non-STEM occupations. However, difficulties in recruitment for STEM jobs suggest a looming national shortage of qualifications and technical skills. Low female aspiration for, and participation in, STEM education and careers compound this problem.
In 2016, VET qualifications at diploma level or above were most common among women in the areas of commerce, hospitality and human welfare. Numbers in STEM areas such as engineering and IT were very low. Even women with certificate III/IV qualifications in engineering were more likely to work in sales and services than as technicians.
In short, Australia loses female talent at every stage of the STEM pipeline.
Women with engineering qualifications are more likely to work in sales and services than as technicians.Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock
As the recent documentary The Leadership shows, it’s a lost economic opportunity, as well as a serious issue of gender inequity, socioeconomic disadvantage and insecurity. Women are missing out on the many career opportunities in rapidly growing sectors underpinned by STEM, particularly in the digital economy. It’s also a huge waste of talent.
Despite many attempts to increase female STEM participation over the years, only in the past few years have structured and co-ordinated plans been drafted.
The first Women in STEM Ambassador, Professor Lisa Harvey-Smith, was appointed in 2018. The ambassador works to promote systemic changes that will produce a STEM sector that is diverse, inclusive and contributes to the nation’s competitiveness.
In spite of these efforts, a snapshot of Australia’s STEM workforce reveals women account for 21% of those who completed post-secondary STEM education and only 16% of the STEM-qualified (VET and university) workforce. Australia’s VET STEM-qualified workforce is overwhelmingly concentrated at the certificate level (1-4), with only 19% at the diploma/advanced diploma level. Significantly, only 8% of this VET STEM-qualified workforce is female.
In addition, a pay gap exists. Full-time female workers earn less on average if working in engineering, science and IT fields.
Even if women are working in STEM fields, they are still paid less on average than their male peers.Zapp2Photo/Shutterstock
Challenges dwarf responses to date
The newly announced cadetships represent a small investment compared to the scale of the challenges to be overcome.
In 2016, women in the workforce with VET STEM qualifications numbered 95,300. Of these, about 35,200 (37%) held a diploma or advanced diploma, a greater proportion than for men. While the addition of 500 female VET advanced diploma holders by 2025 is an improvement, the number is small. This may reflect capacity constraints in higher education and industry.
The cadetship program focuses on the front end of the talent pipeline, namely attracting women into STEM and providing the requisite qualification and skill base. It is unlikely to address the equally important and long-standing problem of retaining women in STEM careers.
However, there have been indications some educational providers may interpret the program’s scope to include medical and health sciences (or STEMM). These are outside the STEM areas that traditionally struggle to attract women.
In the longer term, unless women upgrade beyond the level of advanced diploma and build deep competencies in technologies relevant to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, they will be unable to satisfy industry needs. Industries will then lack the talent needed to meet the challenges of disruptive technologies.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution means STEM-trained women will be needed to meet industry needs.Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock
The 500 women cadets may also face competition from the products of other initiatives, in particular the government’s A$1.2 billion wage subsidy for 100,000 apprentices.
Overall, the government deserves credit for experimenting with a scheme that involves closer collaboration between industry and education providers to tackle market failure in managing talent. Rapid technological development and major uncertainty have added to the urgency of this challenge. This scheme is a first step in solving the complex problem of attracting women into industries requiring STEM talent and thereby easing skills shortages.
Social media algorithms, artificial intelligence, and our own genetics are among the factors influencing us beyond our awareness. This raises an ancient question: do we have control over our own lives? This article is part of The Conversation’s series on the science of free will.
In 1983, American physiologist Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment that became a landmark in the field of cognitive sciences. It got psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers either very excited or very concerned.
The study itself was simple. Participants were connected to an apparatus that measured their brain and muscle activity, and were asked to do two basic things. First, they had to flex their wrist whenever they felt like doing so.
Second, they had to note the time when they first became aware of their intention to flex their wrist. They did this by remembering the position of a revolving dot on a clock face. The brain activity Libet was interested in was the “readiness potential”, which is known to ramp up before movements are executed.
Libet then compared the three measures in time: the muscle movement, the brain activity, and the reported time of the conscious intention to move. He found both the reported intention to move and the brain activity came before the actual movement, so no surprises there. But crucially, he also found brain activity preceded the reported intention to move by around half a second.
This seemed to suggest participants’ brains had already “decided” to move, half a second before they felt consciously aware of it.
In Libet’s experiments, participants had to remember where the dot was at the time they made the conscious decision to flex their wrist.Tesseract2/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Had neuroscience just solved the free will problem?
Some researchers have since argued that the intuitive idea that we have a consciousness (or a “self”) that is distinct from our brains — and that can cause things in the real world — might be wrong. Really being the “author” of our actions seemed to suggest, at least for many people, that an “I” is making the decisions, not the brain. However, only brains (or neurons) can really cause us to do things, so should we be surprised to find that an intention is a consequence rather than the origin of brain activity?
Others were less convinced of Libet’s study and have attacked it from all possible angles. For example, it has been questioned whether flexing the wrist is really a decision, as there is no alternative action, and whether we can really judge the moment of our intention so precisely. Perhaps, sceptics suggested, the findings could be a lot of fuss about nothing.
But Libet’s findings have been successfully replicated. By using other neuroimaging methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in combination with clever new analysis techniques, it has been shown that the outcome of decisions between two alternatives can be predicted [several seconds before the reported conscious intention].
Even Libet himself did not seem comfortable claiming our “will” does not matter at all. What if we could still say “no” to what the brain wants to do? This would at least give us a “free won’t”. To test this, one study asked participants to play a game against a computer that was trained to predict their intentions from their brain activity. The research found participants could cancel their actions if the computer found out quickly what they intended to do, at least up to around 200 milliseconds before the action, after which it was too late.
But is the decision not to do something really so different from a decision to do something?
It depends what you mean by free
Another way to look at Libet’s study is to recognise it might not be as closely related to the “free will” problem as initially thought. We might be mistaken in what we think a truly free decision is. We often think “free will” means: could I have chosen otherwise? In theory, the answer might be no — being transported back in time, and placed into exactly the same circumstances, the outcome of our decision might necessarily be exactly the same. But maybe that doesn’t matter, because what we really mean is: was there no external factor that forced my decision, and did I freely choose to do it? And the answer to that might still be yes.
If you are worried about “free will” just because sometimes there are external factors present that influence us, think about this: there are also always factors inside of us that influence us, from which we can never fully escape — our previous decisions, our memories, desires, wishes and goals, all of which are represented in the brain.
Some people might still maintain that only if nothing influences our decision at all can we be really free. But then there is really no good reason to choose either way, and the outcome might just be due to the random activity of neurons that happen to be active at the time of decision-making. And this means our decisions would also be random rather than “willed”, and that would seem even less free to us.
There are always things influencing us that are beyond our control.Victoriano Izquierdo/Unsplash, CC BY
Most of our decisions require planning because they are more complex than the “spontaneous” decisions investigated in Libet-style studies, like whether to buy a car, or get married, which are what we really care about. And interestingly, we don’t tend to question whether we have free will when making such complex decisions, even though they require a lot more brain activity.
If the emerging brain activity reflects the decision process rather than the outcome, we might not even have a philosophical contradiction on our hands. It matters a lot what we call “the decision” — is it the moment we reach an outcome, or the entire process that leads to reaching it? Brain activity in Libet-style studies might simply reflect the latter, and that suddenly does not sound so mysterious anymore.
Where to from here?
While Libet’s classic study might not have solved the problem of free will, it made a lot of clever people think hard. Generations of students have argued long nights over beer and pizza whether they have free will or not, and researchers have conducted increasingly innovative studies to follow in Libet’s footsteps.
Researchers had to acknowledge they might not be able to provide a definite answer to the big philosophical question. But the field of cognitive neuroscience and voluntary decisions is more alive, interesting and sophisticated than ever before, thanks to the bold attempts by Libet and his successors to tackle this philosophical problem using science.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many have felt anxious about going to the GP and other health facilities, believing these places have had a greater risk of transmission. A lot of us have also had to juggle work, childcare and home-based education.
So it’s not surprising the number of women attending for preventive health checks dropped alarmingly. For example, 145,000 fewer breast cancer screenings were done between January and June this year than in the same period in 2018. It’s important, however, not to let the pandemic lead to avoidable poor health.
Here are some of the main health checks the the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) recommends for women. These checks are advised for women at average risk, but women who have a strong family history of any of these conditions should ask with their GP if they should start screening earlier or seek different types of testing.
Cervical cancer screening
The National Cervical Screening Program recommends cervical cancer screening every five years for women aged between 25 and 74.
In December 2017, a new test was introduced for cervical cancer screening in Australia, and the testing interval changed from two years to five years. The change in testing interval was recommended because the new test is able to detect changes earlier. This means fewer women are tested each month, with the decline starting from December 2019.
Even accounting for this, the number of women tested in April and May 2020 fell sharply. There was some recovery in June, although rates in Victoria remain low. It used to be common practice to do a pelvic examination at the same time as a cervical screening test to look for problems in the uterus and ovaries, but this is no longer recommended due to its poor accuracy.
Number of Medicare claims for routine cervical screening tests in Australia 2019-20.MBS Statistics Online
Breast cancer screening
Breast Screen Australia recommends an x-ray of the breasts, called a mammogram, every two years for women aged 50-74. Breast screening services were paused in April, but are now open again in all states, including Victoria.
Evidence for the benefits and harms of breast screening has been highly contested, so it’s important women make an informed choice. Cancer Australia states that for every 1,000 women screened for 25 years from the age of 50, around eight will avoid dying of breast cancer. On the other hand, eight women in every 1,000 diagnosed by screening will be treated unnecessarily (usually with surgery) for cancers that would never otherwise have been diagnosed.
Screening works by finding a cancer before a woman has any symptoms, but it also finds cancers that grow very slowly or even regress, and that would never have caused symptoms. More sensitive tests, such as MRI, find more of these “overdiagnosed cancers” than other tests.
Breast cancer survival has improved significantly in the past few decades, but most of this seems to be due to improvements in treatment rather than improvements in screening.
Ovarian cancer
Unfortunately, there is no method for early detection of ovarian cancer and the symptoms can be vague, often leading to late diagnosis.
The most common symptoms are abdominal bloating, abdominal or pelvic pain, appetite loss, feeling full quickly, indigestion, urinary frequency or urgency, constipation, unexplained weight loss or gain, and unexplained fatigue.
Women who have any of these symptoms for more than a few weeks should see their GP.
Sexually transmitted disease
About 1 in 20 women in their 20s will have a chlamydia infection and 1 in 200 will have gonorrhoea. These increase the risk of pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility. HIV, Hepatitis B and syphilis are less common, but important to detect early.
There is no formal screening program but the RACGP encourages sexually active women younger than 30 to have regular testing, especially if there has been a change in sexual partner.
Cardiovascular disease and diabetes
The leading causes of death in women in Australia are dementia, heart attacks, strokes, and lung cancer. The risks of these can be reduced with good preventive health.
Women shouldn’t forget to get their blood pressure and cholesterol regularly checked.Shutterstock
The RACGP recommends women have their blood pressure checked every two years from age 18, cholesterol every five years from age 45, and checks for diabetes and kidney disease when at risk (for example if you have a family history). GPs recommend a general health check for those aged 45 to 49, or a heart health check for those over 45, or Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people over 30.
Treating high blood pressure and cholesterol and reducing smoking rates has prompted a massive decline in Australian heart disease deaths since their peak in the 1960s. However, women are less likely to have all risk factors for heart disease checked, and younger women are less likely to be put on blood pressure or cholesterol-lowering medication than men with the same risk level.
Bowel cancer
Bowel cancer screening is recommended by the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program for all Australians every two years between ages 50 to 75. This is done by a stool sample test, using a kit mailed by the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program and returned by post. This screening reduces deaths from bowel cancer by 16%.
GPs have worked hard to ensure their patients’ safety during the COVID-19 pandemic. But it’s also important the recommended preventive health checks are not delayed unnecessarily.
